High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [78]
The book’s title, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, implies that people were interested in knowing just what Mrs. Fisher did know about old Southern cooking, and Fisher declares that she had been frequently asked by her lady friends and patrons—nine of whom are listed by name and address—to reveal some of her knowledge and experience of Southern cooking, pickles, and jelly making. She explains that she had more than thirty-five years’ experience in the art of cooking “Soups, Gumbos, Terrapin Stews, Meat Stews, Baked and Roast Meats, Pastries, Pies, Biscuits, making Jellies, Pickles, Sauces, Ice-Creams, and Jams, preserving Fruits, etc.” Her recipes are set out in careful detail “so that a child can understand it and learn the art of cooking.” Most cookbooks of the era leave much unstated, assuming knowledge on the part of the cooks, but Fisher is meticulous and exacting in her instructions. She suggests that cooks not only sift but also brown the flour for her fruitcake recipe and that they beat whites and yolks separately. She advises readers that two pounds of sweet potatoes will make two pies. Her oyster gumbo recipe is thickened with filé (a sassafras powder) which she calls gumbo and in true Creole fashion (as one who spent time in Mobile would know) she reminds her readers to “have dry boiled rice to go to the table with gumbo in a separate dish. Serve one tablespoon of rice to a plate of gumbo.”
Like Russell, Fisher celebrated the culinary legacy of Southern black cooks. But while Russell briefly acknowledges it in her introduction as the genesis of her culinary training, Fisher presents it on the plate, with detailed recipes for many traditional Southern and African American favorites as stuffed ham, corn fritters, and watermelon-rind pickles. Fisher and Russell, however, are more than simply the authors of the first African American cookbooks. In the pages of their works, they preserve the culinary cultures that created them and had enabled them and so many like them to survive and prosper during the western migrations. In this, each moved forward the African American quest for acceptance in American society and the growing culinary diversity of African American life.
CHAPTER 8
MOVIN’ ON UP!
Resilience, Resistance, and Entrepreneurs Large and Small
Chicago, Illinois—
I’ve always been more a Langston Hughes type than a Carl Sandburg person: one who is more at home in the urban enclaves of New York City than anywhere else. The hog butcher to the world ethic of the Second City was really not for me. Then, in the 1970s, when I was travel editor for Essence magazine, I made my first trip to the Windy City. The South Side of Chicago was still the South Side in those days, and friends made sure that I visited a series of clubs and joints, including Flukey’s, a local club of some fame. Entering it was like opening a door into the past: The walls were hung with red flocked wallpaper, a long mahogany bar lined one wall. It looked like nothing so much as a nineteenth-century brothel. It was a time of wide-brimmed hats and swaggering men wearing platform shoes who flashed, made deals, and strutted like brightly colored peacocks. The barmaids called everyone “Baby” and “Sugar” and seemed to have been imported directly from some sweet home Down South. As the evening was softened more and more by bourbon and ginger ale, I began to realize that the crowd was made up of folks that shared common history, common roots. People circulated and exchanged news of the Mississippi hometowns that they shared. They asked about friends and families and passed around the copies of the local paper that the most recent traveler had brought back from down home. Now gone, Flukey’s was an atavism, a bar like many others that must have existed in the days of the Great Migration, when folks who came from the same hamlets and small