High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [25]
Once caught, meat was dressed and cooked immediately or dried in some form of pemmican. The resulting jerky would have been familiar to Mande peoples, who knew the sun-dried khilichili of the area that would become Niger.
While Africans might have found many of the Native American agricultural methods familiar, Eur opean settlers marveled at the harvests. The early bounty of the New World was described by Thomas Hariot, a member of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke expedition in 1585. He wrote of corn in A True and Briefe Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: “Pagatowr, a kinde of graine so called by the inhabitants, the same in the West Indies is called Mayze. Englishmen call it Guinney wheat or Turkie wheate.” He went on to detail that the kernels were of “divers colours: some white, some red, some yellow, and some blew. All of them yeelde a very white and sweet fouwre which maketh a very good bread. Wee made of the same in the countrey some mault, whereof was brued as good ale as was to bee desired.” (Hariot’s use of the term Guinney [for Guinea] indicated that corn was already well identified with the African continent. It became a major food crop there following the Columbian Exchange and would have been familiar to many West Africans.)
In the English colonies, corn, beans, and pumpkins or squash were grown in symbiotic harmony by the native peoples. The system—called a conuco in the Caribbean—consisted of seed corn planted in a circle in small hillocks in rows. (The corn was grown so that there were three annual crops of it.) The beans were planted along with the cornstalks and used them as bean poles to climb. The leaves of the pumpkins or squashes provided shade for the young plants. The Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) of the Northeast called this Indian agricultural triad the Three Sisters. In Virginia, Hariot noted the efficiency of the system and especially that of the Native way of planting with single seeds carefully sown. He remarked that Native agriculture netted about two hundred English bushels an acre, as opposed to the prevailing European system of scattering seeds at random, which produced about only forty bushels an acre. Again the Native peoples and Africans shared similar knowledge, for the Africans were also familiar with the careful planting of crops, and in general compass, neither group used the scattered-seed method in practice in Western Europe.
John White’s illustrations are invaluable to researchers, as they show other early Indian practices that offer additional cultural parallels. One depicts an Indian man and woman eating; their use of their hands and the manner in which they are hunkered on a mat around a communal bowl might have brought a nod of recognition from African arrivals. Earthenware cooking vessels and fish cooked on a grill of sticks—two other shared traditions—also appear in White’s watercolors.
While they cannot be discerned in White’s detailed drawings, tastes were also similar. African and Indian both evidenced a taste for the soured and the fermented. Dishes like sofk (a Creek watery maize gruel prepared from water, corn, and ashes that was slowly cooked until thick and then allowed to sour for three days) would have had a familiar tang to those who had eaten West African dishes such as the leaf-wrapped and fermented akassa and ablo of the Republic of Benin, the granular attiéké of the Ivory Coast, and the buttermilk-like lar and tchiakri of Senegambia. One-pot boiled soupy stews like Cherokee succotash (from the Narragansett sukquttahash), with beans, corn, and pumpkin, would have been reminiscent of the one-pot stews that abound throughout the African continent. The coarsely ground corn porridge known as samp by the English and sagamité by the French might have been recognized