Thursday, June 30, 2016

A Few Things That Have Been Written About the Diaspora of African Foodways

     One August night, in 2004, I cooked dinner for my family and some students from my children's high school. I don't remember what I cooked, but it was something from Julia Child, because she had died the day before. One of the students, Raquel, asked what was so important about Julia Child. I answered that she had gotten my generation to cook French food from scratch and to use fresh produce. Raquel responded that her family had always cooked from scratch and kept a garden, because they couldn't afford not to. I'll admit I was gobsmacked. That was my introduction to Edna Lewis' view of cuisine.

      The written word will never match lived experience, but here are some readings that have helped this white person learn.

     Jessica B. Harris' High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America is rich in personal observations and historical detail of the journey, and an extensive bibliography, some of which follow.  Adrian Miller's Soul Food the Surprising Story of An American Cuisine; One Plate at a Time is a delight, weaving the multiple influences of Africa, England, France, Italy etc. on African American foodways.

       Archeology and original source records of the Atlantic provide concrete evidence for historic food practices. "Excavating the South's African American Food History," Anne Yentsch's chapter in Anne L. Bower's African American Foodways, Explorations of History and Culture shows the limits of what is knowable.
     
      On the question of African foodstuffs incorporated into Southern diets, and New World foods into the African, Judith A Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff's In the Shadow of Slavery, Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World brings out all the complexity of those foodstuffs, their origins and the records of their trans-shipment in the slave trade.

     Because cooking and eating is a performance, like jazz, I find Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, an invaluable companion to thinking about cuisine.

       Before Sydney Mintz wrote Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, he and Richard Price gave us The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective.  Theirs is a critical examination of questions of continuity and modification across African-American communities in the New World.

      Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South is a tough read, but useful for grasping the dynamics of Southern household. Her husband, Eugene Genovese, wrote Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World the Slaves Made in the 1970s. He emphasizes the resistance and negotiation which characterized the relation of slave to master. Ira Berlin's Many Thousand Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America makes clear the complex variation in social relations and cultural practices through time and across geography.

   

   


Sunday, June 26, 2016

South Carolina Crossroads

The kitchen of Borough House in Stateburg, Sumter County, South Carolina.

     Michael Twitty, cultural historian, chef, culinary re-enactor, and the pied-piper of the "Southern Discomfort Tour" once described, for NPR's Splendid Table, the intersections of multiple food tradition.  "It's about negotiation. What's important? What are you going to keep? What are you going to leave behind? What are you going to compromise on? What are you going to bring together?"

     I'm approaching obliquely the question of the influence of enslaved Africans and their descendants of Southern food.  Bear with me for a few paragraphs. A decade ago I visited the Borough House Plantation, in the high hills of the Santee, near Sumter, South Carolina.  Rain was pouring down but soon I was snug inside a 200 year old house with walls of dirt.  The house is part of a 6 building compound built of pisé de terre, rammed earth. Borough House is owned by descendants of the man who directed its construction. Dr. William Wallace Anderson caused Borough House and its dependencies, as well as the nearby Church of the Holy Cross, to be built between 1821 and 1850.
     When Anderson died in 1864, his eldest son William Wallace Anderson, Jr. inherited the Borough House. Anderson Jr. served in the Confederate Army, but it was his younger brother, Lt. Gen. Richard Heron Anderson, the ranking officer from South Carolina, who directed the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
     You might conclude that the Anderson family were slaveholders. At the time of the building of Borough House, there were 54.  In the Slave List kept by the Andersons, and maintained for a number of years after the War, the number rose to three times that.
     Pisé de terre is a labor intensive method of construction, requiring the digging and time consuming molding and pounding of earth into walls a foot and a half thick. As the Historic American Building Survey noted, it was "built chiefly by slaves under the direction of Dr. Anderson."
     Dr. Anderson learned of the method from Rural Economy by S.W. Johnson, (New York, 1809). (Dr. Anderson's copy is in the Borough House's library.) Johnson's work was actually a translation of a treatise by a Frenchman. An architect, Henry Holland, introduced it to the English nobility in the late 18th Century. The method itself was used by the Romans in Southern France, in China and in Africa.
     Historic preservationists wonder if those slaves or their ancestors knew of rammed earth houses in West Africa. Such a house form and method is seen in West Africa and Haiti, at the Judicial Center archeological site in Charleston and the Yaughan, Curriboo, Mulberry and Quinby Plantations.


Rammed Earth Slave Cabins at Mulberry Plantation
   
             So there was this a transplanted Scotsman, Dr. Anderson, with an American book translated from the French, in one hand, directing his slaves, some African born, some American born, on the other. He had the capital, the written word and the power to direct the others' skilled labor, but could not have succeeded without them.

     Borough House isn't open for tours. If there were, I'd wish the focus to be on the shared ownership of those remarkable, enduring earthen walls. Here at this intersection, at that place and time, knowledge, available materials, and skilled labor came from all over the world to make, from the earth, buildings that would last for centuries.  The name for that is American.


   
     

Saturday, June 25, 2016

The Pain of Erasure


     Nell Graydon's Cookbook, From My House to Your House, 1968 edition, contained this photograph. 

     The photograph and references to Fannie and the Watsons were removed in the 1985 revision. This is erasure.  It erases Ms. Graydon's debt to Victoria, Alice, and Johnny Watson, as well as her mother-in-law's cook, Fannie.

     I wrote about Cokesbury, South Carolina in a previous blog, "My Two Souths." Nell Graydon published a cookbook, From My House to Your House, to benefit the restoration of the Cokesbury Methodist Conference School, with which my grandmother's family, the Connors, were associated. 

     Her forward describes some of the recipes as ones she wrote down in 1914, while visiting her husband's home in Greenwood, South Carolina.  She writes "In the kitchen, old Fannie prepared the most marvelous food on an iron range. Her waffles, golden brown broiled chicken and tender biscuits were the most delicious I had ever tasted."  

     I think we can assume she was not referring to her mother-in-law when she speaks of "Old Fannie."  Into the kitchen Ms. Graydon went, pencil and paper in hand, to pepper Fannie with questions.  She was frustrated that Fannie wouldn't specify exact quantities, telling her "If you don't know that you'll never learn to cook." Graydon admired Fannie's skills, but labeled her "what the old people called 'a natural born cook.' "

     Fannie's Beaten Biscuit recipe is the first in the volume. Graydon allowed that try as she would, she was never able to make perfect beaten biscuits.  She augments what she learned from Fannie with this stanza:


Of course I'll gladly give de rule
I mek beat biscuits by
Dough I ain's sure dat you will mek
Dat bread the same as I
'Case cookin's like religion is---
Some's 'lected, and some ain't
An rules don't more mek a cook
Den sermons mek a Saint
---Wheeten


     As I learned from Googling the first line, this is excerpted from "Beaten Biscuits," published around 1899 in Bandanna Ballads by Maria Howard Weeden of Huntsville, Alabama. Her work was praised by none other than Joel Chandler Harris. Weeden's poems captured stories she'd heard from the freedpeople she painted with great skill.

     Ms. Graydon's cookbook also includes Alice's Bread. Alice and Johnny Watson, pictured above, had spent seven years preparing and serving the food in the Graydon home. Johnny's mother, Victoria, had done this before them, from 1942 to 1961.

     A few years ago, I met Ms. Graydon's son while collecting a piece of Connor furniture.  He gave me a copy of the 1985 revision of the cookbook, and allowed as how the photograph and references to Fannie and the Watsons had been removed.

     This is erasure.  It erased Ms. Graydon's debt to Fannie, to Victoria, Alice, and Johnny Watson. In effect, it returns the fruit of their labor to their white mistress, in perpetuity.

     How tragic that even in the 100 years since Ms. Graydon encountered her, we cannot freely accept, indeed celebrate, the claims of chefs and cooks in Fannie's lineage, for a stake in the creation and skilled maintenance of Southern cuisine.

Two of Maria Howard Weeden's Watercolors of freedpeople.







   

     

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Some Things That Have Been Said About Southern Food Ways

     I'm grateful to Cynthia Bertelsen's piece in New Salt. It set me the task of thinking hard about the history of a region which is half my heritage.  Consider this short essay the first course.

     A good place to begin tracing the influence of English food ways on Southern food is historian David Hackett Fisher's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Published in 1989, it has been called one of the greatest works of American History.

    And it shows us that the diversity of Southern food has its earliest origin in the diversity of just one of the nations who sent colonists to what would become the South.
   
     Fisher follows the English  from four regions in England to four regions of the early colonies: East Anglia to Massachusetts, the South of England to Virginia, the North Midlands to the Delaware and the Borderlands of North Britain to the Backcountry.  Based on extensive research on both sides of the Atlantic, Fisher describes, in rich detail, the characteristics that distinguished each group.

     Food ways get special attention.  The sections on tidewater Virginia and the Backcountry or interiors of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and some coastal regions of South Carolina, cover two major regions of what we now call the South. We learn that English food ways varied by region, and carried into regional variations in food ways across the South.

     Virginia's culinary customs were highly stratified. Prosperous planters kept the same food ways as the gentry in southwestern England.  Roast beef was a huge favorite, as were asparagus and strawberries. The more humble folk ate one dish meals of greens with salt meat and hominy or corn porridge. Fisher observes that the 17th century diet of those of humble rank was both much like the diet of farm workers in the south and west of England, and similar to black "soul food" in the 20th. "Frigacy" or "fricassee" of chicken, veal or rabbit simmered in an open pan was favored by the middle and upper classes. Fried chicken was another favorite of the elites like the Byrds and Carters.
 
     Fisher concludes that this style of Virginia cooking became the basis for Southern food---highly seasoned, roasted, simmered or fried.  It is similar to the English cooking style called "Dorset fashion." However,  baking developed very slowly on the Chesapeake.  Another common feature of Virginia and the south and west of England was the observance of feasts at funerals, and holy days such as Easter Monday and Christmas.

     The North British Origins of the settlers of the Southern Highlands made for fundamental differences.  "Clabber, butter, fat mushy bacon, cornbread...they know neither beef nor mutton." Clabber or sour milk with curds and whey was the staple of both North Britain and the backcountry. The North Britons returned the potato to the Americas. The small cakes of unleavened dough, baked on a stone or circular griddle in an open hearth go by many names but are ubiquitous in North Britain and the southern backcountry.  True baking was not favored. The oats of the North were replaced by maize, and pig's flesh, boiled or fried, was despised in North Britain but in the backcountry replaced difficult to maintain sheep.  The favored Feast dish for community events in the backcountry was a "pot-pie" boiled in iron cooking pot over the hearth.

     The question perhaps is, of all this, what remains and why?



   



   





Tuesday, June 21, 2016

How Not To Write About Southern Food

     If you ever doubted that food is political, 'tis the season to be dis-abused of your naiveté.
Cynthia Bertelsen, a serious food scholar, reviewer, traveler and writer has taken to her blog to pen an essay: Juneteenth: Edna Lewis and the Myths Behind Southern Cooking. I'm half Yankee and half Palmetto State woman, but I feel like she might as well wave the Confederate flag and say The War wasn't about slavery. Ms. Bertelsen is an avowed champion for the English origins of Southern Cooking, and she's up in arms about claims of African influence on this cuisine. 

     Her argument begins with her labeling said claims as both myths and theories. Can something be both theory and myth? Worse, she can't decide if said mytho-theories are "accepted wisdom," or whether there is an argument to be had. From all the community cookbooks I've seen, I the "accepted wisdom" was that Steel Magnolias did all the Southern hospitality.

     It's unfortunate that she focusses her annoyance on Edna Lewis. As Lewis is dead, she can't explain herself. Why not choose to de-mythologize a living writer, like Toni Tipton-Martin or Jessica Harris or Michael Twitty?

    And then there's the paucity of her research on the background of said claims. Bertelsen cites Gourmet's 2008 article, Francis Lam's NYT 2015 essay and some of Lewis' cookbooks as her sources. (Note that Francis Lam tracked down surviving kin to expand his understanding of Lewis.) 

     The strangest sentence in Bertelsen's essay reads "According to the stories larding her books...she grew up on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a settlement populated by freed slaves. Unfortunately, Freetown no longer exists..." As if the product of Reconstruction and Jim Crow should be preserved?  Rather than cast doubt on what Lewis wrote, why not check the census and other documents yourself?

      Bertelsen questions whether anyone can be 100% certain of Karen Hess' view that most recipes in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking are in fact largely recipes gleaned by the writers from African American cooks, their own, and others. 

     She wants statistics, original sources, and signed recipes.  Here's what annoys me most about Bertelsen's essay: Anthropology and archeology, two sciences that explore both myths and theories, have been wrestling with this question since the 1940s. Melville Herskovits and Franklin Fraser debated African American cultural continuity and assimilation, and Lorenzo Dow Turner investigated Africanisms in Gullah.  

     In the 1940s the accepted wisdom was that the Middle Passage and slavery stripped away all culture and Gullah was just badly spoken English.  Herskovits and Fraser did the research and analysis to disprove this.  More recently, in the field of Linguistics, Creole and Pidgin studies have carried the research further, and archeologists have tested the remains of physical culture against the evidence from linguistics. 

     Cynthia, the evidence is there if you choose to search for and see it.  

     Her counter argument is that in 2016, Latin American cooks staff French and Japanese restaurants, and aren't creating something new.  I'd argue that this phenomena is only 50 years old, dating to 1965 Immigration law changes, and has already produced change. How does she think avocados got in California rolls or the fish in tacos?

     Instead she asserts that colonial and Federal cooking was influenced by the tastes of the British aristocracy for French food, and sea captains and merchants for exotic foodstuffs from the East.  She argues that slave ships, not slaves, brought African foodstuffs to the New World.  I ask, who knew what to cook with these foodstuffs? It is her argument that connections between contemporary West African cooking and Southern would cinch the argument for large scale culinary transfer.  Surprize: she didn't recognize many. But why would either remain static for 200 years?

     The strangest argument she presents is that North America received a small portion, 5%, of the slaves sent to the Americas, and that by 1810, 90% of slaves were born in America.
I cannot fathom why these facts should support her argument against African influence in the Colonies, as slaves were moved between the Caribbean and the Colonies; she believes that American birth would dilute, rather than concentrate, the influence of African foodways. 

     She ends by laying at Edna Lewis' feet the blame for an aura of nostalgia that permeates the new southern cuisine of the 1980s and the locally sourced cuisine of the contemporary South.  While it is true, as Anne Mendelson has pointed out, that the early years of Gourmet were saturated with reverence for the past,  the Edna Lewis feature belongs to the Gourmet of Ruth Reichl, whose writers, like John T. Edge, Francis Lam and Jonathan Gold investigated culinary change in process.

     It is Bertelsen who stands accused of nostalgia for Merry Olde England!