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By Root 440 0

food and its cosmopolitan lifestyle. It was the city of the Continental Congresses, the home of the Declaration of Independence, and the second capital of the United States. In 1780, the city numbered 2,150 blacks among its citizens. The city’s Quaker background and its location—in the North, but near the slaveholding South—gave it special significance for African Americans. In the same year, Pennsylvania took its first step toward gradually abolishing slavery, an act that transformed the city into a veritable mecca for blacks, freedmen and enslaved alike. By the 1790s, Philadelphia was a city of promise for blacks and numbered more free blacks among its citizens than did Northern cities like New York and Boston or Southern ones like Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. The city was home to such notable blacks as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, former slaves who had purchased their freedom and were critical to the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and the Free African Society. Black churches and a lively abolitionist movement among the free black community were a part of the city’s daily life.

Like many cities of the fledgling nation, Philadelphia had an African underpinning that came from the bustling port, where ships arrived daily from the Caribbean and from Africa bringing foods, goods, and slaves and giving the city a lively creole feel. The docks and seaport areas of Philadelphia and other northern maritime cities were riddled with warehouses that were Ali Baba’s caves of ingredients fresh off the boats; plantains and mangoes, while not common, were known among the well-to-do, as were pineapples, a delicacy of Caribbean origin, which became the symbol of hospitality.

Some of the more exotic ingredients would have been familiar to the “saltwater slaves.” Caribbean blacks also knew their uses and no doubt demonstrated them to their mistresses. Women wandered the streets with trays selling their own version of a West African okra-based gumbo complete with foufou dumplings (pounded plantain or other vegetable starch) that would become renowned as Philadelphia’s pepperpot. The spicy dish, prepared from inexpensive cuts of meat and vegetables, was sold for pennies by hucksters of West Indian origin. Although pepperpot certainly had West Indian origins, the good hearty soup of meat and greens also had African American antecedents. In 1778, one soldier from the Revolutionary War recalled that a free black woman, “having received two hard dollars for washing, and hearing of the distress of our prisoners in the gaol, went to market and bought some neck beef and two heads with some green[s], and made a pot of as good broth as she could.” It became a Philadelphia classic, and the street vendors’ cry “Pepper pot, smoking hot” is even illustrated in the 1810 pamphlet Cries of Philadelphia. The city would be a proving ground for African Americans in food for more than three centuries.

Two black chefs would come to prominence in creolized eighteenth-century Philadelphia. They worked in a city where Caribbean and colonial combined and where a group of free blacks created black cultural institutions such as churches and abolitionist organizations early on. Each was from Virginia, and although they had very different paths, they both became culinary stars of the era and attained levels of the culinary profession that remain unequaled to this day. Each worked for one of America’s founding fathers.

In the twenty-first century, it is difficult to conceive that, at the time of the first Continental Congress, all the original thirteen colonies were slaveholding. Indeed, no signer of the Declaration of Independence was without the taint of slavery. Even if the individual was not a slaveholder himself, all the districts represented by the signers were slaveholding. It was the norm, therefore, that the father of the country was a slaveholder, not the exception. George Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, comprised eight thousand acres and was divided into five separate farms on which the enslaved worked. At Mount