In this open access book, Stephen Wooten offers a holistic historical ethnography of cooking and female agency in North Africa, and of the broader cultural and historical significance of women’s culinary agency. Drawing on archaeological evidence, deep historical accounts, and extensive, field-based ethnographic research, Wooten documents and theorizes Malian women’s culinary agency and creativity throughout history and its impact on their lives and lifeways of their families, communities, and society. He finds that women's cooking in Mali not only transforms raw ingredients into cooked fare, thereby producing essential physical nourishment for women and their families, but also helps foster fundamental values and dispositions, facilitate elemental family and community dynamics, and reproduce gender identities and relations. These findings ultimately shed light on the broader issues of what food and food-production within a specific region of Africa can tell us about Africa’s culinary and cultural diversity more broadly. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.