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!