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FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA

JESSICA B. HARRIS

First and always to my late parents

Jesse Brown Harris and Rhoda Alease Jones Harris

And

To the Ancestors who slaved, served, survived, and

created a cuisine from a sow’s ear

To those past who used that food to nourish families,

grow fortunes, and connect communities

And

To the African American cooks, chefs, and culinary

entrepreneurs now and yet to come

Who honor the food, serve it up proudly, and keep the

circle unbroken.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Maya Angelou

Introduction

1. Out of Africa

Foods, Techniques, and Ceremonies of the Mother Continent

2. Sea Changes

Enslavement, the Middle Passage, and the Migrating Tastes of Africa

3. The Power of Three

Arrivals, Encounters, and Culinary Connections

4. The Tightening Vice

Indenture to Enslavement and the African Hand in the Food of Colonial America

5. In Sorrow’s Kitchen

Hog Meat, Hominy, and the Africanizing of the Palate of the South

6. City Food, South and North

Caterers, Cala Vendors, and the Continuing of African Culinary Traditions

O Freedom!

Jubilee Jubilations

7. Westward Ho!

Migrations, Innovations, and a Growing Culinary Divide

8. Movin’ On Up!

Resilience, Resistance, and Entrepreneurs Large and Small

9. We Shall Not Be Moved

Sit-ins, Soul Food, and Increasing Culinary Diversity

10. We Are the World

Making It in an Expanding Black World and Joining an Unbroken African Culinary Circle

Recipes

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

List of Illustrations

FOREWORD

BY MAYA ANGELOU

Jessica Harris, the well-known cook and cookbook author, has taken a great risk. She is already highly respected for the meticulous care she has shown in describing her recipes. She has been reliable in listing her sometimes exotic ingredients and where they can be found. However, in this new book she has offered only twenty recipes. Each is clear and well explained; still, the majority of High on the Hog is comprised of stories and essays written in well-chosen prose about food and how it traveled and made its impact on the world.

Harris has chosen African cookery and tracked its influence to the United States, to South America, and to the Ca rib be an. She shows explicitly how the culinary efforts changed the mores and cultures and people in each place. She has left little room for argument with her findings. I do, however, wonder if Ms. Harris is about to change permanently her ways of producing books.

Because I had written many books and had taught many classes years ago, I thought I was a writer who could teach. When I took the risk of accepting a permanent job teaching, I found I was not a writer who could teach, but a teacher who could write.

If Harris decides that she is more a prose writer than a recipe writer, the world of cookbook users and readers will be poorer for it. However, because she writes so well, all readers will be well serviced.

I will be among that group.

INTRODUCTION

I am an African American. My family comes from here and can trace itself on both sides back over much of the period documented in this book. Therefore I know intimately, and am linked by blood to, the tastes of pig meat and cornmeal that are a part of this country’s African American culinary heritage. I’ve spent more than three decades writing about the food of African Americans and how it connects with other cuisines in the hemisphere and around the world, and so I also know that the food of the African continent and its American diaspora continues to remain a culinary unknown for most folks.

The history of African Americans in this country is a lengthy one that begins virtually at the time of exploration. Our often-hyphenated name, in all of its complexity, hints at the intricate mixings of our past. We are a race that never before existed: a cobbled-together admixture of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. We are like no others before us or after us. Involuntarily taken from a homeland, molded in the crucible of enslavement, forged in the fire of disenfranchisement, and