High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [102]
Increasing numbers of African Americans chose to celebrate Kwanzaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a growing awareness of their own African roots. The Peace Corps and continuing missionary work by churches black and white sent African Americans to the African continent, resulting in more widespread knowledge of the African Diaspora and expanded gastronomic horizons, and contributed to a growing sense of shared culinary underpinning. In larger cities and college towns, dishes of West African jollof rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites.
Then, in 1977, the publication of the autobiography of writer Alex Haley, Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries based on it transformed the way many African Americans thought of themselves and of Africa. Blacks were galvanized by Roots, and large numbers made pilgrimages to the African continent with hopes of discovering their own ancestral origins. (Coinciding with the release of the television miniseries, a travel organization began to offer trips to Dakar, Senegal, for $299, a price that was affordable for many who might otherwise never have traveled to the continent.) They boarded the planes by the hundreds and on the other side of the Atlantic found myriad connections between African American culture and that of the motherland. One major connection they discovered was West Africa’s food. They visited markets and recognized items that had for centuries been associated with African American life: okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. They tasted foods that had familiar savors and learned new ways to prepare staples of the African American diet like peanuts, hot chilies, and leafy greens. In Senegal, they tasted the onion-and-lemon-flavored chicken yassa and the national rice-and-fish dish, thieboudiennse; in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an akara. African Americans began to taste the culinary connections between foods they knew and those of the western section of the African continent.
This new knowledge found its way to a larger public, as the avant garde of African American cookbook authors took a more international approach and reflected a sense of the African Diaspora in their work. Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor, and The African Heritage Cookbook, by Helen Mendes, look at the traditional foods not just of the American South but also of an international African culinary diaspora and contain recipes for dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean as well as traditional Southern ones.
Africa, its diaspora, and their foods, though, were only a part of the expanding African American culinary paradigm; cookbooks of the period also evidence wider-ranging African American attitudes about what to eat and how to eat, like 1974’s Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature, by the eponymous comedian, and 1976’s Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook, by Mary Keyes Burgess of Santa Barbara, California. The traditional foods of the South were still being written about in works like Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family, by Norma Jean and Carole Darden. Using genealogical research that had been popularized by Roots as well as recipe and memoir, the Darden sisters crafted a 1978 cookbook that tells the story of their family through food. It also tells of the diversity of African American food.
Up until the 1970s, the food of African Americans could be loosely categorized by class. The upper classes ate a more European-inspired diet, while the underclass consumed a diet evolved from the slave foods of the plantation South. Regional differences played a lesser role. The South always took primacy of place at the table,