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While in Chicago and Detroit African Americans often lived next door to others from the same Southern region or adjacent Southern states, in New York the lure of jobs had reached beyond the borders of the United States. Migrants to the Big Apple met up with black immigrants from other parts of the globe who had also answered Harlem’s siren song. They came from English-speaking Jamaica, Montserrat, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago and from French-speaking Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Papiamento and Dutch-speaking Aruba and Curaçao. They too followed the lure of available jobs, arrived in Harlem, and brought their foods to add to the mix. Alongside yam sellers and cobbled-together cook stands selling pigs’ feet and fried chicken, Caribbean street vendors also hawked tropical fruits with their multilingual calls.

Yo tengo guineas

Yo tengo cocoas

Yo tengo piñas también

They brought the rhythms of the islands to their cries as they roamed the streets selling the bananas, coconuts, and pineapples of their tropical climes. A 1928 article in the New York Times asked the question “What Tempts Harlem’s Palate?” Author John Walker Harrington discovered that

Harlem is the cosmopolis of colored culture, of gaiety, of art, and the capital of Negro cookery. Harlem’s visitors come from the Southern United States, the West Indies, from South America and even from Africa. In what it eats, Harlem shows itself less a locality than an international rallying point. It is haven where food had the odd psychology, where viands solace the mind as well as feed the body.

Harlem markets were culinary melting pots of the foods of the African diaspora. The roots and tubers of the Caribbean, like tania, eddoes, and cassava, as well as the true yam from Africa, turned up in market stalls next to the sweet potatoes that had claimed their name in the American South. Harrington also noted “crystal fines, as Harlem calls them. They are like a combination of thin-necked squashes and puffy cucumbers, and are covered with fibers of soft whitish filaments… Duly shorn and cut into strips, these strange looking vegetables give body to soups and stews—particularly to gumbo.” He was speaking of a form of the vegetable known as chayote in Mexico, chocho in Jamaica, christophene in the French-speaking world, and mirliton in New Orleans and which made its way into the soups and stews of Harlem’s culinary melting pot.

The Southern foods of black Americans were the mainstays for many in the marketplace. Harrington also observed, “What broccoli is to Park Avenue, the select collards are to the colony of Upper Manhattan.” The leafy greens had primacy of place in the uptown markets. Pork, he noted, is the “leading article of flesh diet,” adding that “every part of the hog finds its way into the Harlem kitchen” and remarking on its use as a seasoning piece of meat in many of the dishes described. Braver than many, he sampled chitterlings, the small intestine of the pig, and said that “their savory odor is their chief lure to those who like them.” Unclear to Harrington, the pungent odor of cooking chitterlings made them anathema in many an African American household, and the scrupulous processing their preparation entailed meant that they were only eaten in homes or restaurants where cleanliness reigned. Chitterlings and dishes like hog maw (the stomach of a pig) and Pig Foot Mary’s pigs’ feet defined African American food preferences harking back to the rural South. They were culinary throwbacks to the meals improvised by the enslaved from the less noble parts of the pig, which were their dietary standbys. In the markets and kitchens of Harlem of the 1920s, they met up with parallel dishes from the Caribbean featuring less noble parts of the pig and similar African-inspired tastes.

Throughout the period, street markets flourished alongside vendors of cooked foods, with small entrepreneurs hawking their wares and providing curbside service for housewives and those who wished to avail themselves