Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [33]
—RUFUS ESTES, Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus, 1911
Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, served hot. Fried chicken. Peach cobbler. Bacon and greens. Apple puffs. Hoe-cake. Wheat-bread.
Southern style. Twain lived in New York and New England for as long as he did in the South. Still, he remained nearly nationalistic about Southern cooking. His menu included far more dishes cooked Southern style than any other; he wrote about those cooked at the Quarles farm with passion and love:
The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor—particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread and fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North—in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread but this is gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite so good as Southern corn bread and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, not anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking.
Like most of his contemporaries, Twain probably didn’t think much about the dishes’ origins; the very fact that they seemed so natural to the place might have prevented that. He didn’t write at any length about who exactly was doing the cooking, who it was that gave them their “main splendor.” And he didn’t muse about why it was, exactly, that these particular foods were cooked so well in the slaveholding states—and, Twain insisted, only there. He didn’t name the enslaved women who worked in the log kitchen, connected to the main house by a “big broad, open, but roofed passage,” or in the smokehouse behind that.
Though these women were almost certainly several generations removed from Africa, their skills—and those of millions of women like them—were anchored in the cooking and customs of their greatgrandmothers’ homelands, as surely as much of their spoken English reflected the cadences and grammar of Fulani, Ibo, Kongo, and other African languages. Rice farmers carried the knowledge of how to build dams and master coastal floods; cooks knew how to fry in oil, how to bake in ashes, how to make vegetables savory by stewing them with a little meat. Their understanding of food—the ways they used it to strengthen, comfort, and sustain their families—made Southern food splendid.
It’s hard to give a brief description of West African food without annoying people who truly know the subject. My archaeologist friend Cameron Monroe, taking me to school, says flatly that “there’s no such place as Africa.” And he’s right, in the sense that talking about “Africa” forces you to make broad and sometimes empty generalizations. Africa is just unbelievably huge; you could pretty well lose the lower forty-eight states in the Sahara, and early Portuguese, English, and Italian mapmakers used to do amazing conceptual backflips to make the continent look like something less than nearly triple the size of Europe.
Still, the cultures of sub-Saharan Western Africa share some broad culinary tendencies, just as those of Northern Europe do. These tendencies and customs were probably especially important to the first generations of enslaved Africans, who had been thrown together without sharing a language, or possibly a religion—without sharing very much at all. Cooking food in a way familiar to all those present could have signaled that they shared at least some widely dispersed customs and practices; it could have hinted at the start of a community.
Of course, the food choices of slaves were often terribly limited;