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While the enslaved black hands in the Big House kitchens of the rural antebellum South helped to Africanize the palates of whites, the street vendors in the country’s Northern and Southern urban areas kept some of the cultural and culinary connections alive as well, by purveying snack foods and fried tidbits that were New World variants on classic African culinary atavisms.

Whether at the upper end of the social scale, like the caterers of the North, or more humble, like the cala sellers and street hawkers of the South, blacks in urban areas, North and South, both free and enslaved, kept alive traditions of manners and of vending that originated on a continent that they neither knew or claimed. Increasingly, whether free people or those with a view toward freedom, they were Americans moving toward dreams of full citizenship who had become a major force in the urban food-disbursement chain.

A GENTLEMAN’S GENTLEMAN

Now my young friends, you must consider that to live in a gentleman’s family as a house servant is a station that will seem wholly different from anything, I presume, that ever you have been acquainted with; this station of life comprises comforts, privileges, and pleasures which are to be found in but few other stations in which you may enter; and on the other hand many difficulties, trials of temper &c, more perhaps than any other station in which you might enter in a different state of life.

So writes Robert Roberts in the introduction to his book, The House Servant’s Directory; or, A Monitor for Private Families: Comprising Hints on the Arrangement and Performance of Servants’ Work. Published in 1827, it is one of the first books by an African American to be issued by a commercial press. Today, Roberts may seem to be a conundrum: a free man in the early part of the nineteenth century extolling the virtues of a life in domestic servitude. However, he was a man of his time. His pioneering book and the world that it reveals document the lifestyle and traditions of African Americans in domestic service in both the North and the South.

It is not known whether Roberts was born slave or free, but it seems that he was born in Charleston in the late 1700s. He arrived in New England in 1812 as a free man with the ability to read and write and with the skills at keeping house that would bring him great wealth and renown. It is thought that he arrived in Boston in the employ of Nathan Appleton, a Boston merchant and politician who’d visited Charleston from 1802 to 1804. Shortly after Roberts’s arrival in Boston, he met and married Dorothy Hall, the daughter of a black Revolutionary War hero from Exeter. Although Roberts was listed in 1820s Boston city directories as a stevedore, that may be an error, for during that decade and earlier, he had worked as a butler for Appleton and for Kirk Boott, a Massachusetts industrialist. Some scholars believe that Roberts may have gone abroad with Appleton between 1810 and 1812 and met Boott in En gland; in his book, Roberts states that he had served some of the finest families of France, England, and the United States.

Roberts’s fame as a butler came between 1825 and 1827, when he worked for Christopher Gore, a former Massachusetts governor. Roberts worked in the British tradition of the trusted majordomo and ran the well-to-do house hold with Gore’s supervision. The first edition of The House Servant’s Directory, published shortly after Gore’s death, includes a posthumous note from the ex-governor: “I have read the work attentively, and think it may be of much use.”

Roberts’s directory is written in the style of English house hold manuals of the time but distinguished itself by being written to two hypothetical butlers in training, Joseph and David. Roberts is candid in his discussion about the travails of being in service and advises his imaginary disciples to be accommodating at all times and to observe and understand the temperament of their employers. He also admonishes the young men to “be very