Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [34]
But whatever they were given as provisions, whatever else they grew or trapped or hunted or scavenged, the slaves cooked food as they understood food should be cooked. And just as a language can quickly adopt new words within a slowly changing grammatical structure, particular ingredients were naturally cooked using familiar, traditional, durable skills. The fact that many West Africans made vegetable relishes—using meat more as a flavoring than a primary ingredient—then served them over cooked starches, may have been more important than whether the starch was corn, as on the Gold Coast, or yams, as among the Ibo. West African gardeners and cooks knew millet, rice, corn, yams, and manioc; they knew eggplant, peppers, okra, black-eyed peas, cowpeas, onions, and a variety of greens. Now, no matter what there was to fill it, the stewpot would keep on simmering—whether there were yams or white potatoes, roots baked on the hearth.
West Africans shared six major cooking techniques: boiling in water, steaming in leaves, frying in deep oil, toasting beside the fire, roasting over the fire, and baking in ashes. Like specific ingredients such as sesame, many of these techniques became important in the emerging food culture of the American South—a culture that drew on African and European roots and used many ingredients grown for generations by Native Americans. Within that food culture, there could still be many distinctions between place and class and race. But just as the African banjos became the heart of bluegrass music and Yoruba to-gun (“place of assembly”) buildings were adapted as the shotgun houses common through the Mississippi Delta, African elements were simply included, without comment, among the foundations of Southern food. The cooking on the Quarles farm was creolized to the point that both whites and blacks may have seen it, simply, as cooking.
Twain’s menu is full of dishes with African roots. His fried chicken (perhaps the region’s single most famous dish) was cooked in deep fat, a technique used in Scotland but perhaps more common in Western Africa, where the cooking fat would have been palm oil. What’s more, the chicken was so familiar to many Africans, who raised the birds in open yards (a practice common through much of the South), that enslaved women eventually displaced white women as Virginia’s main chicken vendors. A pot of bacon and greens would be prepared more or less identically to the meat-flavored vegetable relishes of Western Africa, though with new ingredients substituted—salt pork, for instance, replacing the dried shrimp common in some African regions. Twain’s “early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, served hot,” also used one of the region’s most common cooking techniques. Corn pone could be substituted for simmered sorghum or millet—or might not represent a substitution at all, since maize was well known in regions like the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). And chitlins were deeply associated with slave cooking, especially after the late eighteenth century, when planters increasingly offered poor cuts instead of whole animals to be divided.
The slaves on the Quarles place might have cooked very differently than did those in other states or regions. They probably didn’t make hoppin’ John, the Carolina classic of cowpeas and rice simmered with a seasoning bone of