Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America Read online

  Of course, slavery and subordination to European masters who distributed rations to enslaved Africans also influenced African American eating traditions. In addition to providing rations, British masters in the southern colonies also granted enslaved Africans permission and the opportunity to cultivate gardens and to hunt and fish on Sundays. Before captivity, African women cooked largely with grains, legumes, some pork, poultry, salted fish, green leafy vegetables, herbs, onions, and hot peppers. Captivity and forced migration changed the diet of Africans in the Americas.6 In the colonial South, the culture of the master class was British. As such, it makes sense here to discuss British foodways in the Atlantic world.

  INFLUENCE OF BRITISH FOODWAYS

  In the British Empire, produce such as potatoes, cabbage, beets, and turnips was traditionally considered food for poor folks and commoners. The English lower classes essentially prepared two types of vegetables: those they served hot, such as cabbage and turnips, and those they served cold, as in salad greens like lettuce, radishes, cabbage (again), spinach, and beets. English elites seldom ate any of these vegetables because they believed they caused flatulence and depression.7 The English elites also believed raw fruit was unhealthy and caused fevers. As a result, they generally stewed or baked fruit until it was very soft, often using it in pies and tarts. The migration of this tradition is best illustrated by the number of different recipes for cobblers (also called bucklers in Virginia) found in southern cookery. For example, Louis Hughes, born into slavery in 1832 near Charlottesville, Virginia, recalled the peach cobbler recipe slaves used on a cotton plantation near Richmond where he worked. The peach cobbler was one of the prized dishes baked every Fourth of July (I will return to Fourth of July celebrations later). He published his autobiography in 1897, but his memory of the peach cobblers baked as part of the plantation’s Fourth of July feast was crystal clear: “The crust or pastry of the cobbler was prepared in large earthen bowls, then rolled out like any pie crust, only it was almost twice as thick. A layer of this crust was laid in the oven, then a half peck of peaches poured in, followed by a layer of sugar; then a covering of pastry was laid over all and smoothed around with a knife. The oven was then put over a bed of coals, the cover put on and coals thrown on it, and the process of baking began. Four of these ovens were usually in use at these feasts, so that enough of the pastry might be baked to supply all. The ovens were filled and refilled until there was no doubt about the quantity.”8

  Africans adapted the culinary culture of the English as they prepared food for English planters in the Americas, particularly the English penchant for pies.9 In addition to the predilection for pies, the British passed on to the Africans in early America the view that food quintessentially meant meat, particularly red meat. The “parochial food-traditions” of the English elites dictated that they consume an abundance of red meat and few raw fruits and vegetables.10 English culinary tradition contrasted sharply with the Igbo and Mande traditions, which favored consuming the majority of a day’s calories in vegetable and whole-grain form, with meat serving primarily as a flavor enhancer and not as the center of a meal.11

  The Portuguese explorer Manoel Gonzales found that the “middling sort” dined “most upon butcher’s meat,” eating vegetables only as a supplement. The English were “indeed great flesh-eaters,” downing large amounts of meat for dinner and supper. The English nobility most likely viewed the largely corn, potato, poultry, and pork diet of the Irish as the food of the colonized, because most Irish living under British imperialism survived on it.12 The cooking and baking of the poor depended on lard and pork; indeed, pork was a favorite of the poor, because pigs could feed on just about anything and were therefore easy to raise.13 Members of the British Empire continued to raise pork after they migrated to North America, and it remained an important staple.

  THE CHESAPEAKE BAY REGION: “LAND OF CULINARY NEGOTIATION”

  In the Chesapeake Bay region, Native Americans (the Sapony, Mattaponi, and Pamunkey, among others) ate considerable amounts of plant foods, especially corn, their staple grain. They would salt, parch, steam, ground, roast, bake, soak, pound, and ferment corn and a host of other grains. Each of these methods changed the flavor, texture, digestibility, and nutritional value of the grain so treated. They also popped corn, used it to bake bread, and cooked whole ears of corn in the ashes of fires. As in Latin America, many tribes added ash to make hominy, which later emerged as a staple in the diet of black and white southerners.14 In addition to hominy, Native Americans in the Chesapeake Bay region became well known for their bread, called ponap, from which pone bread (made with cornmeal and water) was most likely derived. They also ground nuts and seeds—for example, those of the sunflower—into flour from which they made nut bread from it.15 Tribes in the Chesapeake Bay area were also known for their expertise in cooking with venison, their chief meat until the arrival of domesticated pigs with the Europeans. They made soups with venison, dried it, stewed it with hominy, and barbecued it. Amerindians in Virginia delighted in barbecued turkey and enjoyed other fowl, raccoon, rabbit, otter, turtle, and squirrel. They also roasted and dried oysters and used them in stews.16 Sources show that after dining with American Indians upon their first contact, European settlers in the South then began incorporating their various corn and bean dishes, along with seasoning techniques, into their diets. Europeans and Africans also acquired from Native Americans methods for catching and cooking indigenous fish and wild game such as squirrel, possum, raccoon, rabbit, and bear. These are some of the most essential Native American influences on European and African American cuisine in the Chesapeake region.17

  After several attempts, the British first established colonies in the Chesapeake region in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. The overwhelming majority of British colonists in the region were commoners. Travel accounts provide evidence that settlers and their slaves learned how to hunt wild game such as turkey, raccoon, and rabbit and also how to cook local plant foods. Except for the turkey, most Africans had already hunted and cooked similar animals in West Africa. Africans had also cooked with oysters before arriving in the Chesapeake Bay region and the Carolinas.18

  One historian argues that slave masters in the Chesapeake Bay region were not prosperous enough to grant their slaves the time and space required to cultivate their own subsistence crops as slaves in the Carolinas and West Indies did. In general, he says, Africans in the Chesapeake region largely depended on their masters for rations, such as corn and pig parts. Another study on the Chesapeake region contradicts this conclusion, insisting that Igbo slaves kept small gardens in which they grew plants common in Igboland or indigenous varieties that substituted for those too tropical to grow in the Southeast:

  Igbo in Virginia substituted “yams” for their old primary stable (Dioscorea), but maintained nearly all the secondary subsistence crops of their ancestral village agriculture, except for coco-yam, plantains and bananas (and tropical fruits such as papaws or papayas). The loss of plantains and bananas seems to have been made up with maize and meal, while butter and lard replaced palm-oil and cayenne replaced Melegueta pepper. Okra, associated with fertility as well as with proverbial knowledge in some parts of Igboland, and black-eyed peas (which in Virginia and indeed the entire South still bring good luck if eaten on New Year’s Day), and squashes and watermelons and gourds and “greens” and others quickly reappeared and continued as staples of Afro-Virginian slave foodways.19

  In addition to raising familiar African crops, slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region also hunted, fished at night (known in Virginia as “negur daytime”), and raised fowl to supplement their diets.

  Primary sources on enslaved Africans in Virginia and Maryland also contradict the view that slaves did not receive the time or space to cultivate gardens. Virginia school tutor Philip Vickers Fithian worked for Robert Carter. The enslaved Africans on Carter’s holdings made food out of weekly rations consisting of “a peck of Corn, & a pound of Meat a Hea
d!” Most important here is the fact that, in addition to their rations, enslaved Africans on the Carter plantation grew produce in small plots allocated by their masters. Fithian recalled that on “several parts of the plantation” slaves cultivated “small Lots of ground allow’d by their Masters for Potatoes, peas, &c.”20

  Another source documents similar scenes in Maryland in the late eighteenth century. Slave Charles Ball was born in Calvert County about 1781. He claimed that on “every plantation, with which I ever had any acquaintance,” the masters and overseers allowed the slaves to garden, most often in “some remote and unprofitable part of the estate, generally in the woods.” Ball explains that slaves supplemented their lean rations of “coarse food, salt fish, and corn-bread” during the spring in three ways: farming their “patches,” fishing the Pawtuxet River, and fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. The river and bay provided slaves with an “abundance of fish in the spring, and as long as the fishing seasoned continued. After that period each slave received, in addition to his allowance of corn, one salt herring every day.” Lean times for slaves in the Chesapeake Bay meant filling their pots in the slave quarters with fish from local waterways as well as the corn, potatoes, pumpkins, melons, onions, cabbages, cucumbers, and “many other things” they grew in their gardens.21

  SPECIAL OCCASIONS: HOG-KILLING DAY AND THE FOURTH OF JULY

  Chesapeake slaves, like those in other parts of the South, experienced both feast and famine. For example, Ball fondly remembers the fall of the year, when a feast followed the harvesting of the corn and the cotton, although this was followed by a very lean laying-up time when a slave’s daily work regime and meat rations were drastically reduced. Between the harvest and Christmas, slaves on Ball’s plantation survived on a diet of “Corn bread, sweet potatoes, some garden vegetables, with a little molasses and salt, assisted by the other accidental supplies that a thrifty slave is able to procure on a plantation.” Ball argues, “A man who lives upon a vegetable diet, may be healthy and active; but I know he is not so strong and vigorous, as if he enjoyed a portion of animal food.” December was hog-killing time, when slaves received a “tolerable supply of meat for a short time” as they gorged themselves on the parts of the hog that the master’s family refused to eat: chitlins (entrails), trotters (feet), the snout and jowls, scrapple (the neck of the hog), “hog maw” (the mouth, throat, or stomach lining), and crackling or pork rinds (deep-fried skin, a by-product of rendering lard).22

  In addition to the harvest celebration and hog-killing day in December, after 1776 slaves feasted on the Fourth of July as part of the national independence celebration. A barbecue, according to former Virginia slave Louis Hughes, “originally meant to dress and roast a hog whole, but has come to mean the cooking of a food animal in this manner for the feeding of a great company.” It’s not clear when it started, but southern planters early on began to commemorate Independence Day with a barbecue. As Hughes put it, “a feast of this kind was always given to us, by Boss, on the 4th of July.” Hughes goes on to say, every slave “looked forward to this great day of recreation with pleasure. Even the older slaves would join in the discussion of the coming event.” Perhaps Hughes was referring to the older slaves who were born in Africa, now looking forward to a feast that celebrated a freedom they had not experienced since they were forcibly taken to the Americas. “The older slaves were not less happy, but would only say: ‘Ah! God has blessed us in permitting us to see another feast day.’” While white southerners celebrated independence from British tyranny, enslaved Africans co-opted the day to celebrate a brief respite from grueling work and hunger. Here is Hughes’s description of how African Americans barbecued a hog and sheep on a Virginia plantation in either the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century:

  The method of cooking the meat was to dig a trench in the ground about six feet long and eighteen inches deep. This trench was filled with wood and bark which was set on fire, and, when it was burned to a great bed of coals, the hog was split through the back bone, and laid on poles which had been placed across the trench. The sheep were treated in the same way, and both were turned from side to side as they cooked. During the process of roasting the cooks basted the carcasses with a preparation furnished from the great house, consisting of butter, pepper, salt and vinegar, and this was continued until the meat was ready to serve. Not far from this trench were the iron ovens, where the sweetmeats were cooked. Three or four women were assigned to this work. Peach cobbler and apple dumpling were the two dishes that made old slaves smile for joy and the young fairly dance.23

  It is difficult to tell if Native American or African traditions influenced this early American barbecue performed by African Americans in Virginia. As mentioned, barbecuing was a favorite technique among Native Americans in Virginia. But we also know that before their arrival in the Americas, young women in Africa learned how to cook whatever wild game the men of their village or tribe brought home. African women cooked most meats over an open pit and ate them with a sauce similar to what we now call a barbecue sauce, made from lime or lemon juice and hot peppers.24 The point here is that enslaved Africans in the Americas came from regions where feasts and famines were a way of life. They also came from regions where they barbecued on feast days. Thus barbecuing was another African technique that they had to adapt to the ingredients available to them as enslaved African cooks on white-owned plantations.

  One book on family and community relations and experiences among whites and blacks in colonial Virginia argues that neither group understood the contours of the other’s life in such areas as the kitchen. Similarities and differences “between black and white life have proven to be more elusive.”25 The 1717–1721 diary of the English planter William Byrd provides insights into the culinary lives of blacks and whites in Virginia. In the eighteenth century, Byrd, a lawyer, trader, and auditor, was the owner of several plantations totaling 26,231 acres and worked by an unnamed number of slaves.26 Living on a large isolated plantation in colonial Virginia, Byrd was free to eat in violation of English parochial food traditions. No one from London could judge him for how he ate.27

  Byrd, like most other elite planters in the colonial South, had a complete kitchen staff of enslaved Africans to prepare all his meals. Enslaved African cooks reserved their best cooking for the wealthy, where they had access to excellent cooking facilities and often the best ingredients money could buy. In general, enslaved Africans who cooked for the rich were female and received their training from the female elders within their immediate and extended families. Over time, the planter class took great delight in the traditional dishes made by African American cooks, such as hoecakes and fried chicken. These traditional dishes, argues historian Eugene Genovese, made their way to the tables of the rich and “became a much larger part of the upper-class preference than some among later generations of whites have wanted to admit.”28

  Byrd’s diary entries from June 1720 to March 1721 indicate that his cooks made some dishes reminiscent of African traditions, such as “hoe-cake and onions.” Enslaved Africans made hoecakes by baking bread in hot cinders on the blade of a hoe. This baking process is a facsimile of how African women in Angola and São Tomé had baked corn bread wrapped in banana leaves in the cinders of fires. In addition to hoecakes, African cooks in colonial Virginia served “stewed turkey,” which was also reminiscent of stews made in West Africa. Enslaved African women in colonial Virginia were also observed cooking “fried chicken,” “fricassee of hare,” and “fried pork.” All three of these meats were quite common in West African kitchens on the other side of the Atlantic. The only difference is that, in Africa, women fried with “the pungent castor-like” palm oil; in America, Africans adapted to frying largely with lard.29 In addition to the African adaptations involving corn and various meats, African plantation cooks seem to have quickly gained the confidence of their masters’ palates with a menu of essentially African dishes adapted to American raw materials.30

  AFRICAN FOODWAY
DOMINANCE IN THE CARIBBEAN

  In the three decades following the end of Spanish hegemony in the Caribbean in 1650, British immigrants established large and highly profitable sugar plantations throughout the region. Most of the new sugar estates used enslaved Africans and a few white servants for labor. About one out of every four of the arrivals on the island of Barbados was an African who would work hand in hand with white engagés (indentured servants). Whereas indentured servants dominated during the first generation of British settlement, Africans became the majority labor force during the second generation, and their numerical dominance in the Caribbean continued to increase.31

  Most of the earliest servants performed gang labor on plantations, first for joint-stock companies and then later for individuals. They worked twelve-hour days clearing new land, planting, hoeing, and harvesting cash crops. The artisans among them worked their trades and tended to receive better treatment than the unskilled did. The indentured servants were multiethnic European men and women in their late teens to early twenties who signed four- to seven-year contracts. Planters frequently bought and sold their labor, mistreated them, and forced them to live and work in Spartan conditions.32