Thread by @LibraryofVA

#ArchivesBakeOff Thread!

While researching materials regarding Virginia suffragists for this year's #19thAmendment anniversary, we came across this article in the Virginia Suffrage News about a Suffrage bake sale that took place in Richmond, VA.

Now there's a lot of interesting information in this paragraph but one thing stood out. What in the world are "snakey-noodles"? A question that became even more intriguing when Google was no help.

Google, alas, doesn't know everything but this is where archivists and librarians shine! There was one search result that seemed someone relevant - text from a book called Molly Brown's Senior Days written by one Nell Speed in 1913.

In the book, one of a series, Molly Brown, a Southern girl attending a New England college mentions more than once to her friends how good "snakey-noodles" are, but her classmates, like us, have no idea what she is talking about.

Although we now had a description of the baked good it seemed even stranger that even though Google, the characters in this book, nor anyone at LVA had ever heard of, the writers of Virginia Suffrage News seemed to think their readers would have. Why might that be?

So the next stop was to look into Molly Brown's author - Nell Speed was born in Kentucky and moved to (you guessed it) Richmond, Virginia. She wrote the first four Molly Brown books but died in 1913. After which, her sister, Emma Speed Sampson took over the series.

Does that name sound familiar? Take a look back at the suffragists listed in our original article. It includes Mrs. Emma Speed Sampson, who now seems to be the most probable bringer of the "snakey-noodles". But....was she the baker and inventor of this treat?

If you recall, in the clip from Molly Brown, Nell Speed has Molly say that "our old cook" makes the treats. Later in the series, Molly reiterates this.

Molly Brown as a character has many similarities with the Speed sisters. And as "snakey-noodles" appear in both the factual and fictionalized accounts of their lives - it seems probable they were drawing from their own childhood experiences.

The characters in Molly Brown seem ready to take "the old cook's" recipe and profit it off of it themselves. In fact - Emma Speed Sampson later published a cookbook called "Ms. Minerva's Cook Book" written in dialect and featuring stereotyped illustrations of a Black woman.

And it does include a recipe for "snakey-noodles". Disclaimer: This recipe is written by a white woman in the aforementioned "dialect" style.

So to come full circle - the white women of the Virginia Suffrage League were fighting for the rights they deserved but this seemingly small episode reminds us that too often they overlooked the rights and contributions of the Black women striving beside them.

Did Emma Speed Sampson bake those "snakey-noodles" she sold? The ones, that according to the article, "should forever silence [those] who claim that suffragists have forgotten the home-makers' arts". We know it at the very least it probably wasn't her original recipe.

We may never know the thousands of names of those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to further so many causes. The best we can do in this case is to point out that in the 1890 census, one Mariah Richardson was cook in the Speed household of Kentucky.

How many of the recipes in "Ms. Minerva's Cook Book" were Ms. Mariah's? Although we don't know for sure, it's something to ponder & we would like to raise our glass to Mariah Richardson for the name "snakey-noodles" & the valuable reminders this research rabbit hole provided

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