High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [1]
Yet, for centuries, black hands have tended pots, fed babies, and worked in the kitchens of this country’s wealthiest and healthiest. The disrespect for our food and for the people who cook it has been a battle that has raged for decades. Ebony magazine’s first food editor, Freda DeKnight, wrote about it in the introduction to her 1948 cookbook, Date with a Dish: “It is a fallacy, long disproved, that Negro cooks, chefs, caterers, and homemakers can adapt themselves only to the standard Southern dishes, such as fried chicken, greens, corn pone and hot breads.” More than a half century after the book’s publication, at a period when chefs have become empire builders and media millionaires, that debate still rages. Certainly I will have much to say about slave markets, both those in which my ancestors were sold and others where my ancestors and those like them sold goods that they’d grown and items that they’d prepared. I will speak of scant meals of hog and hominy and of simple folk who became culinary entrepreneurs, like illiterate “Pig Foot” Mary, who created a real estate empire from the food that she cooked on an improvised stove on the back of a baby carriage!
I will also speak of presidential chefs like George Washington’s Hercules and Thomas Jefferson’s James Hemings and of an alternate African American culinary thread that weaves through the fabric of our food. This parallel thread is a strong one and includes Big House cooks who prepared lavish banquets, caterers who created a culinary co-operative in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century, a legion of black hoteliers and culinary moguls, and a growing black middle and upper class.
My family is a part of that middle class and encapsulates both culinary threads. In 1989, I wrote in Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking, “Fate has placed me at the juncture of two Black culinary traditions: that of the Big House and that of the rural South.” The Jones side of the family always held reunions at table. Early childhood memories are filled with images of groaning boards, of “put up” preserved peaches, seckle pears, and watermelon rinds, of “cool drinks” such as minted lemonade, of freshly baked Parker House rolls and yeast breads. The Harris side of the family were no slouches at “chowing down” either. Grandma Harris insisted on fresh produce, and some of my early memories are of her gardening in a small plot where she lived.
Writing about the food of African Americans connects me to my forebearers. On one side of the family was Samuel Philpot, who was born enslaved in Virginia and in his thirties at the time of Emancipation. My mother knew him, and I have several photographs of him, as he lived to be more than one hundred years of age. He was reputed to have been a Big House servant who on one occasion served Abraham Lincoln at supper. He married the daughter of free people of color, settled in Virginia, near Roanoke, and became the progenitor of the Jones side of my family. On the Harris side of the family, my great-grandmother Merendy Anderson had an orchard in the post-Emancipation period where she grew stone fruit—plums, peaches, and more—and sold them to neighbors in her Tennessee town. Closer to me were both of my grandmothers, who embodied the culinary traditions of their families. Grandma Harris cooked little and not particularly well, but she made beaten biscuits and could put a hurtin’ on a mess of greens. She read her Bible and wrote poetry, but was plainspoken, a vestige