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.
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.
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