Pancake flap: ‘Aunt Jemima’ heirs seek dough

In Chicago, Green became a cook for Judge Charles Walker, who recommended to the R.T. Davis Milling Co. that she represent the pancake mix, according to Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Marilyn Kern-Foxworth.

“She was a magnificent cook, an attractive woman of outgoing nature and friendly personality, gregarious in the extreme,” the book says.

Green’s breakthrough appearance for the Aunt Jemima brand happened in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, where she “loved crowds and loved to talk about her slave days, ” according to the book.

Green “emerged the image of a wise old cook from the Deep South of Civil War times, who had brought her secret pancake recipe to a benighted northland,” according to Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity, by University of Iowa English professor Doris Witt.

Green died in her late 80s in 1923 after a car struck her on the sidewalk in Chicago, according to her obituary in the Sunday Morning Star. She was still working as Aunt Jemima at the time, according to numerous accounts.

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