High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [39]
The Jefferson-Randolph family cookbooks contain two recipes known to have originated with James Hemings: chocolate cream and snow eggs, both European desserts. Other recipes in the cookbooks display the culinary traditions of the enslaved, who brought their ways into the kitchen of the founding fathers and helped create such uniquely American dishes as catfish soup, peanut soup, and Virginia gumbo. It is to known chefs like Hercules and James Hemings and to the thousands of unnamed and unheralded others like them throughout the original thirteen colonies that the United States of America owes the fleeting tastes of Africa that mixed and mingled with those of Europe in the burnished copper pots and the porcelain serving bowls of the founding fathers.
TO MARKET TO MARKET
It is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of blacks in this country and to the human need for self-betterment that the slaves made time for themselves when all of their time belonged to someone else, but they did. They carved minutes from tasks by doing them more rapidly, by helping one another, and by taking shortcuts. Having a minute’s respite, they stayed up and toiled on their own projects after night fell and they returned to their cabins. In the cracks and quiet times that they created in their harassed lives, they found a way to make a world. Many worked for themselves and their own benefit. Some saved and foraged seeds and tended gardens by moonlight or fished and hunted nocturnal animals like possum; others raised yard fowl for their eggs or hogs for their meat. Still others wove rugs and quilted blankets from scraps using homemade lamps that burned tallow. They assembled brooms and created other myriad goods that could be traded or sold.
Masters knew of this industriousness; some even found that it was easier to distribute seeds and allow the enslaved to supplement rations by growing the vegetables that they preferred on their own time. Many of the plants—okra, watermelon, eggplant, and gourds—that appeared in the slave gardens harked back to distantly remembered African tastes. Others spoke of American adaptations: European collard greens were used instead of African ones, and sweet potatoes replaced the African yams, while New World hot chilies had become important ingredients on both sides of the Atlantic. Their production was such that in many cases throughout the South, masters often purchased surplus goods from their own slaves’ gardens, paying them with cash, trade goods, or bartered privileges like passes to visit relatives—a commercial symbiosis between master and enslaved that seemingly contradicted the conditions of enslavement. Thomas Jefferson bought cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and squash from his slaves. George Washington purchased hunted game and fish. In this manner, they and others like them acknowledged that these were indeed items that the enslaved had grown or made on time that was their own and, as such, had to be purchased.
In Natchez, Mississippi, Samuel Chase, a slave on a local plantation, raised hogs and poultry and grew potatoes and corn on his own time. With his mistresses’ knowledge, he sold them to folks in the surrounding area from a wagon that was described as a virtual grocery on wheels. More important, he was allowed to keep the monies earned for his own benefit.
Chase’s activities and those of others like him redefine our current ideas of enslavement. Even more surprising is the notion of markets maintained and patronized by slaves. Yet such markets existed throughout the Upper and Lower South during the period of enslavement, with the knowledge, if not the total approval, of masters. The slave-run markets were places where slaves would gather to barter or purchase the foodstuffs