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Stirring The Melting Pot: The African American Imprint On Cooking And Food
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by Joanne Morris |
“African Americans planted it, grew it, harvested it, cooked it, served it…”
—Jessica B. Harris
Iron Pots & Wooden Spoons:
Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking
Sweet candied yams. Savory collard greens. Warm cornbread. Tender ribs lusciously covered in barbeque sauce. Oven-fresh cobbler baked with succulent peaches in a brown sugar nirvana topped with a heavenly crust. These are just some of the delights of Southern cuisine, known today around the world as soul food. Yet, while soul food is familiar to many, what is often not recognized is how thoroughly the rich, diverse African American culinary imprint has been stirred into America’s melting pot of food. This essential contribution is one of the significant imprints—alongside art, literature, politics, music and much more—celebrated in the national traveling exhibition America I AM: The African American Imprint.
With its centuries-old roots grounded in West and Central African cultures and diets, the culinary imprint can still be seen today, whether in food terms, cooking techniques, or delicious recipes. For instance, both the peanut synonym “goober” and the name of the famed Creole dish “gumbo,” which means “okra,” have their origins in the languages of the Congolese cake yams made with dark molasses and gingerroot powder?
These are a few examples of popular American foods that represent the culinary African American imprint. Acclaimed cookbook author and culinary historian Jessica B. Harris acknowledged the length, depth, and breadth of this imprint by noting, “African Americans planted it, grew it, harvested it, cooked it, served it….”
Are There Really American Foods of African Descent?
You may be surprised to know what foods were brought to this country through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Hundreds of years later, we can still find some of them in pantries and on kitchen tables across the country, from sesame seeds and black-eyed peas to peanuts. Originally brought to Africa from Brazil by the Portuguese slave traders, the popular peanut was introduced to the colonies through the slave trade. Likewise, yams and watermelons, both products specific to African agriculture, traveled across the ocean to take root in southern soils.
Another food item in American cuisine that benefited from the African influence is one we often don’t associate with either Africa or America—rice. In fact, just as cotton and tobacco were cash crops cultivated by enslaved labor, which generated millions of dollars for this nation’s colonial and pre-Civil War economies, rice played a major role in the agricultural development of America. The success with rice was the direct result of enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants’ agricultural know-how. African rice farmers—of which a significant number were women—from areas such as Angola and Senegambia were often targeted by slave traders because of their expertise. Today, rice not only remains an American food staple, but the United States is the fourth largest exporter of rice in the world.
Clearly, the hands-on role of enslaved African Americans planting, growing, and harvesting food, particularly in the South, helped to define the emerging American cuisine. But nowhere would the imprint be felt greater than in how these foods were prepared.
Did the Collision of Cultures Impact the Imprint?
Though enslaved Africans were living in the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, Florida in the late 1500s, the seeds of the African American culinary imprint were planted in August 1619 with the arrival of 20 African men and women England’s first permanent colony in Jamestown, Virginia. Over the centuries, the African American population would grow into thousands and then millions. Among them were West and Central Africans from hundreds of culturally diverse tribes and ethnic groups, who spoke just as many languages and dialects.
It was the collision of cultures—West and Central African, European, and native populations—that created the foundation of American culture and American cuisine. However, with enslaved African Americans outnumbering the white population in many places, the African American food imprint often dominated because, as Harris noted, they “planted it, grew it, harvested it, cooked it, served it….” Although Africans who were captured and sold into slavery could not bring their possessions to America, they brought their memories, which included how they prepared foods. These cooking techniques were used both in the slaveholder’s kitchen and in the slave quarters where they cooked for their own families.
One of these techniques was deep-frying—with peanut oil or lard—which, over time, became a standard method in American cooking. In fact, this African way of cooking led to the elevation of a staple “food of African descent” to an American classic—fried chicken. Enslaved Africans applied several cooking methods to create dishes that are American favorites to this day. For example, they adapted how they made eba to hominy, turning it into glorious grits, and how they cooked fufu is the same way they made hotwater cornbread.
As noted earlier, barbeque sauce is another culinary import from Africa. Africans had their own style of barbeque that incorporated a sauce made of chili and sweet peppers. The Timucua Indians of Florida were recorded cooking meat using the barbacoa method by European colonizers as early as the 1560s. These influences would combine to form this unique Southern style of cooking.
The influence of African culture on the American palate is well documented in both history books and cookbooks. From the shores of West Africa to the plantation kitchens of the American South, the foods and ingredients they used are entwined in American cuisine, and can now be found on the menus of restaurants around the country.
The African American Food Imprint in the North
Once in America, stolen West and Central Africans represented the breadth of social backgrounds—from aristocrats to artisans, farmers to soldiers. They were sold throughout the South and the North, until the early 1800s. However, enslaved workers in Northern urban areas were often not confined to service in the slaveholder’s house. These workers would often be sent to sell food on the street, making extra money for their slaveholder. It was enslaved street vendors who took their home cooking, influenced by their African heritage, into the streets of America’s growing cities.
While many Northern states had pre-Emancipation communities of free African Americans (Massachusetts, for example, had abolished slavery by 1783, New York fully in 1827) made up of business owners, lawyers, teachers, ministers among them, there were still many free men and women who became hired housekeepers and cooks. It was these African Americans in the North, including those who escaped captivity, who would also help solidify the national imprint of African American cooking methods. And as more African American Southerners moved North during and after the Civil War, and again as part of the early 20th-century Great Migration, dishes that were once considered solely the domain of the South became as commonplace in Chicago as they were in Charleston.
As African Americans populated states outside of the South, their soul-filled recipes from back home were passed down from generation to generation. Whether through story telling or handwritten recipes, these heirlooms included everything from secret cooking ingredients to special ways of kneading dough for monkey bread. These culinary inheritances allowed Southern cuisine to become a living tradition across the country.
What If There Was No African American Imprint on Food?
It is hard to imagine this nation without the African American culinary imprint. There would be no more eating Grandma’s signature fried chicken at Sunday dinners. No more steaming plates of chitterlings and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. No more family reunions with passionate contests between relatives to see who created the spiciest or most savory barbeque ribs. No more getting your soul filled with soul food.
Stirring the Melting Pot
As you have learned, foods made by African Americans with African cooking methods and transplanted African foods have existed for centuries in America. Yet the use of the term “soul food” to describe African-inspired Southern dishes did not occur until the 1960s. But whether you call it soul food or Southern cooking, this food imprint is an integral part of American cuisine.
As a result, the African American food imprint continues to inspire America’s imagination and satisfy taste buds. From Thanksgiving Day platters of candied yams on dining tables across the country to the availability of canned collard greens and packaged cornbread at the supermarket, from barbeque joints in Manhattan and Seattle to Southern-born fried chicken franchises in cities and towns across America, the gastronomic descendents of those foods and recipes introduced by enslaved Africans are welcomed in every home and in every state. The African American culinary imprint has become an indisputable part of American cuisine that continues to stir our melting pot and transform the heart and soul of America everyday.
The American I AM Pass It Down Cookbook Contest
Want to see if you can stir souls and satisfy stomachs with your favorite family recipes? Then enter the American I AM Pass It Down Cookbook Contest. Winning recipes will be included in the American I AM Pass It Down Cookbook. To enter, click here.
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