What I Don't Know About Black Cooking
It's all on me.
It’s Black History Month, and there’s a slew of possible food-related subjects to explore. I’ve written a handful of stories over the years not only to commemorate this month but because you cannot think, let alone write, about American food without honoring the fact that it’s been built on the backs of slaves. The seeds and cooking knowledge they brought with them from their homelands, the food traditions they recreated, the recipes that have come down to us and those that continue to flow, are the DNA of American food.
All recipes portray their originator’s heritage and circumstances. As recipes evolve they become records of time and place. I got to thinking about all this as I searched for something to write about. The kitchen bookcase has one long shelf that starts with the first cookbooks written by Black Americans and continues on to our times, with a mess of scholarly books in between. The more I leafed through these books and the more I read, the more I realized that what I have always missed was the lives of Black cooks over their more than 300 years in our country’s kitchens. The quiet, yet powerful, rebellion of plantation cooks who took the recipes their owners wanted them to make which they then infused with their native traditions, in essence taking hold of what agency they had through the simple act of confiscating their master’s taste. Or the inventiveness that was needed to create fortifying and delicious sustenance out of nothing but leavings and foraging. And the distinguishing joy of feasts held despite continuous displacement, fear, and mourning.
If there is one hopeful glory of these times we’re treading through it is the abundance of Black voices breaking through the chatter of our food consciousness. They insist we fathom the constitution of one of America’s triumphs.