[1] Flora Mae left school aged 15 to join her mother working in the kitchen at Sunnyhill Plantation in Leon County, Florida.

[3] This was part of a trend of Gilded Age northern scions buying plantations in the southern states as hunting preserves.

[3] The local white planter class had largely lost their wealth in the Civil War and sold off their land; while large numbers of formerly enslaved African-Americans then remained in the area, few had access to purchase the land their families had worked for generations, and many who stayed in the south continued in roles similar to those their forebears had prior to emancipation.

[3] On March 9, 1933,[7] Flora Mae, then 21, married Peter Hunter,[6] who had begun working at Horseshoe Plantation tending the fire in circa 1917,[6] and continued there for 57 years.

[5] Baker hired Flora Mae Hunter in 1933 after tasting her cooking when she helped in the kitchen at Horseshoe, declaring her dishes the best he had ever had in the south and feeling her service meant he no longer needed a chef to travel with him from New York for his three-month stays in Florida.

[6] The global elite who joined the Bakers for quail-hunting season at Horseshoe Plantation gave Hunter's cooking an international reputation.

[3] As Southern Foodways Alliance later described it, she made "pigtail pilau with a side of fried okra and peach cobbler for the workers; turtle soup, pan-broiled venison, and tapioca pudding for the Bakers.

"[3] The Bakers and guests would eat only the breasts of ducks, so Hunter gave the rest of the dressed birds for the plantation workers, similar to the saving of scraps that had sustained enslaved people.

[3] She also cooked for most of her career on a pair of wood-burner stoves, but crafted the recipes in her cookbook to assign temperatures for use in a gas oven.