High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [28]
By the end of the seventeenth century, New York City had a larger black population than any other North American city and was one of the largest slave-trading centers in the colony. In the eighteenth century, New York City was second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in the number of slaves it held. And many of them lived in Lower Manhattan, in what is now Soho and Tribeca. Before then, they lived within and on the farms just outside the walls of the original settlement at the lower end of Manhattan Island. In 1991, construction of a federal building in downtown brought the early African presence in the city vividly to life. Builders discovered an African burial ground that dated to the city’s early years. The burial ground was created in the early 1700s, when Trinity Church banned all Africans from burial in its cemetery. By the early nineteenth century it was built over and forgotten. Its rediscovery was galvanizing; construction stopped and archaeologists took over excavating the site, which proved that Africans had been very much involved in all aspects of the city’s life. They slept in attics and worked as day laborers and as domestic workers as well as farmers and on the docks of the bustling port. They were assistants to craftsmen and sold goods on the streets. They also worked in the taverns of the developing metropolis, like the one owned by Samuel Fraunces.
Fraunces Tavern remains a fixture in downtown Manhattan even today, and in one of my downtown peregrinations, I wandered in. I knew a bit about the history of the place, which had been the most popular tavern of its day. It was the site where Washington bid farewell to the officers of the Continental Army and the meeting place of the Sons of Liberty. After Washington’s inauguration, when the city was the nation’s first capital, the tavern rented space to the new government and housed the offices of the Departments of War, Treasury, and Foreign Affairs. Many debated whether or not the tavern’s owner, Samuel Fraunces, was of African descent. Recent research suggests that he was born in the French West Indies of African and French extraction. The steward of George Washington’s New York house, Fraunces was variously described in texts of the time as Negro, colored, Haitian Negro, and mulatto.
The tavern can be a bit of a tourist trap, but it is an inviting place nonetheless, one where history comes alive and where it is easy to understand the conviviality of taverns of the period, so aptly described in a 1704 poem.
The days are short, the weather’s cold
By tavern fires tales are told.
Some ask for dram when first come in
Others with flip and bounce begin.
The dining room beckoned me that day, with polished brasses, pewter tankards, and scarred wooden tables, but before settling in for a meal, I visited the upstairs museum, where a display on hearth cooking caught my eye. The massive fireplace, which I could almost stand up in, was empty of flame, but an assortment of andirons, hanging cast-iron cauldrons, hooks, and three-legged frying pans called “spiders” were all arrayed in the hearth’s vast maw. Next to it were weighted pails designed to give the modern museumgoers an idea of the weight of the kitchen implements and a suggestion of what cooking in the hearth would actually be like.
I’d had some experience with antique cooking. I’d plucked chickens, singed off their pinfeathers, and cooked over a flame at a Candomblé house in Brazil, and I’d watched hearth-cooking demonstrations at the Hermann Grima House in New Orleans. I’d even attended a seminar in Old Salem, North