High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [85]
Harrington wrote:
On Saturday afternoons and nights the broad sidewalks of Lenox Avenue become groves and gardens and broad fields. Out of huge barrels loom red sugar cane, six or eight feet high, which later, cut in short lengths, is eaten as a stick candy by children. Plantains and bananas in all shades of green and yellow and dark red are ranged in inviting “hands.” Pyramids of tanyans and eddoes loom: bushels of collards and stacks of gigantic yellow and reddish yams tempt the affluence of payday.
Ironically, this multicultural cornucopia was not the fare that most whites who journeyed to Harlem experienced. Harrington was writing in the heyday of whites “slumming” uptown in Harlem’s clubs and nightspots, and his opening question—“What Tempts Harlem’s Palate?”—reminded readers that the fare available in the markets was not to be found on the menus at the hot spots that made the Harlem of the era famous.
Blacks who arrived in Harlem in the 1920s arrived in a city in the throes of Prohibition. The January 16,1920, enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment slowly transformed uptown into a place of speakeasies and cabarets and created a vibrant nightlife that came to define the era. Connie’s Inn, the Nest Club, Small’s Paradise, and the legendary Cotton Club were among the most famous, but Harlem could boast something for virtually every taste, no matter how exotic. From 129th Street to 135th Street between Lenox Avenue and Eighth Avenue alone there were a dozen or so formal clubs and speakeasies offering elaborate floor shows with chorus girls and bands led by notables like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. There were also numerous smaller and often-illicit ones offering jazz, blues, transvestite drag shows, and all manner of entertainment. The most famous, like the Cotton Club, were strictly segregated establishments. Other than the performers, kitchen workers, and staff, no blacks were allowed in the clubs, whose atmosphere was bathed in a faux exoticism designed to evoke plantation days, with scantily clad bandanna-wearing light-skinned women as dancers or tropical fantasies complete with palm trees and jungle decor. Club owners were white, and kitchen staffs black. The menus they cooked were varied and created to appeal to a variety of downtown tastes. The black dishes that they served were invariably as falsely exotic as their decors. Cultural commentator Harrington queried:
If the Negro is to win New York with the fare he likes, as he has won the rest of the world to his jazz and his spirituals, what shall we be eating one of these days? Not the menu of his night clubs and cabarets. Harlem’s exhibition restaurants for white folks have mammies who fry chicken southern style and bake beaten biscuits. But such viands are like Chinese chop suey—all for customers of other racial strains.
At the Cotton Club, the menu offered steak and lobster or shrimp cocktails, a selection of Chinese food like moo goo gai pan, Mexican food, and a smattering of Southern black dishes like the “mammyfried” chicken decried by Harrington and barbecued spare ribs. Slumming “negropolitans,” as upper-crust whites from downtown were known by tart-tongued black writer Zora Neale Hurston, dining in the famous clubs may have felt a frisson of delight and a kinship to black food as they sampled fried chicken and barbecued ribs alongside the lobster and the ersatz international foods purveyed by the white club owners. However, their ignorance of Harlem’s true foods equaled their ignorance of Harlem’s true life. The Harlem denizens they assumed to know had very different lives and daily diets more firmly rooted in the African American culinary culture of the Southern United States, with its emphasis on pork, chicken, and corn.
The Harlem residents relaxed from the drudgery of their jobs as laborers and domestics not at the notable local clubs, where Jim Crow policies meant that no blacks were allowed, but at rent parties. As with the entrepreneurial zeal that created yam sellers and street vendors, rent parties were