Some of this produce and meat supplemented their rations. Growing numbers of researchers, many of them African-American, are bringing to light the uncredited ways slaves and their descendants have shaped how Americans eat. Slaveholders lamented spending on alcohol most of all, complaining that it caused disorder on the plantation and hindered productivity, but memoirs, slave narratives, and court records indicate that rum and liquor were highly sought. Terms of Use They were shipped from ports in West Africa to European colonies in the Americas. For decades she has used an image of okra on her business cards as a symbol of her family's African roots and her own connection to the continent's cuisine. 1/2 tsp (3 ml) salt These cooks knew their craft. Throughout history domestic service was probably the major slave occupation. All rights reserved. In turn, we still enjoy many of the foods they embraced. In 1786, Washington noted that his plantation produced enough woolens to satisfy his needs. Print. Serve in slices, or mash it up with a little salt. This letter was clearly written, and later published, to give the public a firsthand view of how southern slaves were treated. The primary challenge, Harris says, is reconstructing history when one group of peoplein this case, white slave ownersdid their best to subjugate Africans to the point where they were nearly left out entirely. Sweet potatoes are hearty vegetables that grow well in less ideal soil, which made them an ideal crop for enslaved people and lower class whites. The plantation owners then turned to enslaved Africans for labor. Records from six antebellum stores across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia indicate that enslaved consumers spent hard-earned cash on a wide variety of goods. Yet even the most thriftless and impoverished must have cherished the thought of that most conspicuous and politically subversive form of consumption. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nations cultural heritage. Well substitute aluminum foil and an oven. Ice Cream and Oppression when food becomes the measure of equality. What the Slaves Ate. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the front stage of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslaversand of Virginiaon their shoulders. Overcooking will often result in a slimy texture. Enslaved people suffered, yetas bidding in Richmonds auction houses showsthey recognized opportunity as well. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. They . Honor the Boycott Flyer Protesting Dining Halls, A Little Bit of China in Chapel Hill Daily Tar Heel Article, February 9, 1979, Lambda, 1977: Tea Dance and Carolina Gay Association, On-Campus Kitchens of as a Social Center of UNC Housing. Grits are today considered a staple of the Southern diet, but they were, in fact, a classic merger of the Old World and the New. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free African Americans), amounting to approximately 3.8% of the Southern and Border states population. My favorite plant-based recipe for Carolina Gold rice is Southern Collard Dolmades. In many areas, however, it was customary for slaves to work Saturday afternoons and Sundays on their own time, devoting daylight hours to cash-earning activities similar to that of their lowcountry brethren. Your email address will not be published. Franklin Street and its Changing Foodways, 2018, Average Age of Death and Average Income Across Durham County, 2014, The Reputation of Carolina Inn Restaurants, UNC Department of Nutrition Cookbook 1983, Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen Owner Interview, 2017, The Expansion of Chinese Restaurants in Chapel Hill During the 1980s, Vincenzo Marrone Interview, The IP3 Story, Student Resistance to Labor Rights Movements (2005), Student at Vending Machines, Carolina Union, 1983, Foundational and Colonial Culinary Encounters, Thomas Hariot Book Excerpt (1590)- Maddie Dyer, Letter from Florence OSullivan to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Instructions to William Berkeley Concerning the Settlement of Carolina, Hannah Wolleys Original Orange Pudding Recipe, Turkey and Deer Bone Awls from Lower Sauratown, John Whites Secotan Indian Village Watercolor Painting, The Journeys of Needham and Arthur Through the Piedmont, John Smiths observations on Native Virginia Plants and Native American Food Practices, Day Book 1774 No. 2, 23; Ibid., 3, pt. In fact, rice is one of the ingredients slave traders brought with them on their trans-Atlantic voyages from Africa. Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. Honor that past with gratitude and unity. [i] Rutledge, Sarah. Cooked low and slow, these greens are often flavored with a small piece of ham or bacon. But Bailey says her favorite way to eat the peas is in a traditional dish with stewed meat and okra, another plant that originated in Africa. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1979. F. from the Cameron Papers, Letter from John and Ebenezer Pettigrew to Charles Pettigrew, October 3, 1795, Lenoir Family Papers Account of Corn, 1785, Business Invoice from the Cameron Papers, 1774, Fiddle Headed Teaspoon, late 1700s / early 1800s, Distilling Method for Corn Whiskey Lenoir Papers (1790s), Newspaper Advertisement from The Pennsylvania Gazette (Dec 5, 1771), Accounting Record of Spice Purchases for the Household of William Lenoir (May 30, 1772), Sunflower Oil Recipe and Mangel-Wurzel Cultivation, Financial Document The Lenoir Family Papers, Excerpt from A Tour in the United States of America, Blums Farmers and Planters Almanac for the year 1870, Star Brand Fertilizers Advertisement in The Danbury Reporter, Liquid standard presented to UNC in 1883, Planting Fruit Trees to Secure Success by Abigail Bowdish, The Bennehan Familys Sugar and Rum Purchases, Mary Ann Bryan Masons Mrs. Masons New Cookery. My favorite plant-based recipes for corn are Roasted Corn with Garlic Shallot Buttah and Peppery Corn Grits with Tomato Jam. 9eBOn Private moments were rare, as was rest. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. stream A customer at Holland Bottom Farms in Cabot, Arkansas, reaches for tomatoes and okra. More troubling to slaveholders, enslaved people also bought stolen goods in a thriving interracial network of underground exchange. Some indentured servants were also leaving to . While it might be fun to think about boiled sweet potatoes and cornbread, we must also remember the dark truth of slavery. While it is a shameful chapter in our national past, the fact of slavery during the Revolutionary Era is inescapable, and part of understanding how the people of this nascent country ate is exploring how the slaves were fed. The American Historian 2014. Purchased clothes were garish and gaudy, they scoffed. All rights reserved, Culinary historian and author Jessica Harris. (n.d.). There are endless plant-based recipes for sweet potatoesincluding Ash Roasted Sweet Potatoes. Please be respectful of copyright. Yet, many of the plant-based foods in our current diet are reflections of our nations history. A slave who owned chickens or pigs would not run away, some argued. So why cant we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Carolina Gold is one of the heirloom rices receiving a Renaissance. Over 400 years, nearly 13 million Africans were kidnapped and imprisoned on European slave ships bound for the Americas. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. In the American South, okra is probably most well-known as the ingredient found in gumbo. Print. This is nowhere more apparent than in slaves purchase of that most precious and intangible commodity, freedom. On plantations, African American slaves did the same thing. licorice. Some plantations also went a step further and distilled the molasses, the liquid left after the sugar is boiled or clarified, to make rum. A diet consisting of chicken products, molasses, bacon, and wine is one that would be highly appreciated during the 19thcentury. Your email address will not be published. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. The slaves had to work for long hours under the scorching heat daily. Retrieved from, Stephen Behrendt (1999). It was to the economic advantage of owners to keep their working slaves healthy, and those of reproductive age reproducing. 2: 21; Booker T. Washington and Frank Beard, An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work (1901), 1617; Rawick, American Slave, 2, pt. Slave cottage near Bardstown, Kentucky. The first plantations occurred in the Caribbean islands, particularly, in the West Indies on the island of Hispaniola, where it was initiated by the Spaniards in the early 16th century. For further explication of my own views, see Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Powers Purchase in the Old South (2014) and Bonds Burst Asunder: The Transformation of Internal Economy in Confederate Richmond, in Commodification, Community, and Comparison in Slave Studies, eds. A slave plantation was an agricultural farm that used enslaved people for labour. * It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. Provisioning, then, serves as a framework for understanding slave spending. Her story might have been lost if Shields had not dug through news articles and obituaries to re-create her life. The word gumbo comes from the Bantu word for okra, ki ngombo. They intentionally brought it to provide sustenance to slaves during the journey. In a world where masters doled out rudimentary food and raiment, enslaved people most often spent cash to augment allotments, introduce variety to clothing or diets, and, sometimes, to acquire goods or participate in activities otherwise banned. 2 cups (450 ml) grits (regular, not instant). In fact, okra is what helps thicken gumbo. But how could slaveholders take advantage of the consumer process while maintaining some semblance of control? Number of slaves in the Upper South: 1,208,758 (29% of total population) 4,165 million. Gibbs also mentions that the most "industrious" slaves were allowed to have their own gardens and chickens to tend to, and were able to sell their crops/goods for their own profit. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. As small as they were, these potato holes allowed a tiny sense of privacy and self control in a life that rarely had boundaries. For decades, the bang of the gavel had broadcast both triumph and tragedy in Virginias capital as propertylivestock, furniture, human soulstraded in the citys busy auction houses. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. Scientists just confirmed a 30-foot void first detected inside the monument years ago. [4], As the plantation economy expanded, the slave trade grew to meet the growing demand for labor. Vegetable patches or gardens, if permitted by the owner, supplied fresh produce to add to the rations. Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Sugar plantations everywhere were disproportionate consumers of labor, often enslaved, because of the high mortality of the plantation laborers. To honor their legacy, let us remember the role they play in our nations food history. Frederick Douglas describes a similar use of corn: Our food was coarse cornmeal boiled. Beef and hawgs and bacon and syrup and sugar and flour was plenty. Much more than nutrition, cooking was a way to preserve their culture. Its easy to make a plant-based version of Smoky Collard Greens. Gibbs, Robert. Susan McIntosh remembered that, in contrast to the coarse and rough shoes provided by her masters, she and her companions bought calico, muslin and good shoes, pants, coats and other nice things for their Sunday clothes.[4] In his 1859 autobiography, escaped slave Charles Ball described this process in more detail, elaborating spending priorities. These skeletons may have the answer, Scientists are making advancements in birth controlfor men, Blood cleaning? I am wondering, however, about the timing of Mr. Slaveholders wrestled with the implications of such behavior, sometimes outlawing slave spending outright, but more often looking to manipulate it to their own advantage. The system had a good many benefits, as Georgia slaveholder Thomas Clay explained. The slave diet was very simple. The struggle to get by in a regime of growing instability engendered webs of unregulated exchange and distribution. What did the slaves eat on the plantations? Her own mission is to make sure that the contribution of slaves to America's culinary traditions isn't forgotten. But now, the Examiner and the Whig warned, auctioneers patter announced something else entirely, another symptom of the breaking down of the barriers that, until this war, kept the negro in his proper sphere. Enslaved men and women had taken to gathering at the auctions, using grossly improper language in the presence of, and even to, white women. Worse, ladies and gentlemen at auctions [were] forced to bid in competition with bondpeople, men and women who audaciously monopolize[d] the most eligible positions and claim[ed] the nod of the auctioneer. As white Richmonders sold off possessions to make ends meet in hard-pressed times, the citys slaves were going shopping. I top them with broccoli and red chili paste, make quick Southwest Stuffed potatoes, and roast them in wedges for Buddha Bowls. Sweet potatoes were not part of the African diet. Organization of American Historians A mans world? While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waitersthe only jobs they could getAunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sugarcane is harvested about 18 months after planting and the plantations usually divided their land for efficiency. Looking forward to trying out all the recipes. Each of these plant-based foods impacted the history of our eating traditions. When the pot of greens was eaten, there would still be the flavorful broth, called potlicker. [3] George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. They constructed potato holes, often near the fire, where they would bury their sweet potatoes. Culinary historian and author Jessica Harris says food traditions hold symbols and meaning that serve as a historical roadmap. 25 Slaves often gardens grew sweet potatoes in their gardens, utilizing skills that African Americans passed down from generation to generation. Historians have argued that slaves participation in the internal economy was a form of resistance, that simply the act of buying property repudiated slaves status as property. [3], The internal economy allowed enslaved people to attempt to bridge this material gap. Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. In December 1864, other sounds seemed equally troubling. Slaves planted the seeds of favorite foods they were forced to leave behind. It is often smoked or roasted at Fall Pumpkin festivals. Perhaps the easiest way to monitor slave spending was through the operation of a plantation store. Planters embraced the use of slaves mainly because indentured labor became expensive. Want to read more articles just like these? In the American South, okra is probably most well-known as the ingredient found in gumbo. Advertising Notice Weekly food rations usually corn meal, lard, some meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour were distributed every Saturday.

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