Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  16. De Marees, Description of the Gold Kingdom, 40.

  17. Ibid., 40, 76, 113.

  18. Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 13; Allen and Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition To The River Niger, 1:397; Adanson, A voyage to Senegal, 635.

  19. De Marees, Description of the Gold Kingdom, 40, 76, 113.

  20. Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 93–94, 105; Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 38–39.

  21. Frank J. Klinberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau 1706–1717 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 7; see also Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 4 (New York: Octagon, 1969).

  22. William Bosman [chief factor for the Dutch at the castle of St. George d’Elmina), A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts: A Geographical, Political, and Natural History of the Kingdoms and Countries: With a Particular Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Condition of All the European Settlements Upon That Coast, and the Just Measures for Improving the Several Branches of the Guinea Trade (London, 1705), in Pinkerton, A General Collection, 16:392.

  23. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 353–356.

  24. King, “State and Ethnicity in Precolonial Northern Nigeria,” 354.

  25. Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 22, 34–35

  26. July, Precolonial Africa, 103.

  27. Ibid., 38–40; Peter Lionel Wickins, Economic History of Africa from the earliest times to partition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 94.

  28. Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 24–27.

  29. Femi J. Kolapo, “The Igbo and Their Neighbors During the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 1 (April 2004): 116; Elizabeth Isichei, The Igbo Peoples and the Europeans: Genesis of a Relationship—to 1906 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973).

  30. Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing,’” 48, 51–52.

  31. Allen and Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition To The River Niger, 1:284–285, 388–389; de Marees, Description of the Gold Kingdom, 42, 122; Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 36; Abbé Proyart, History of Loango, Kakongo, and Other Kingdoms, in Pinkerton, A General Collection, 16:551, 554.

  32. Hawkins, A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, 73, 77, 101.

  33. Ibid., 90–91.

  34. Ibid., 135.

  35. Hawkins, A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, 201.

  36. Ibid., 129–130.

  37. July, Precolonial Africa, 74, 103.

  38. Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 215.

  39. Ibid., 145.

  40. Ibid., 215.

  41. Ibid., 7–8.

  42. Ibid., 8, 75.

  43. Alex Haley, Roots (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 8; see also 14, 10, 21.

  44. Canot, Captain Canot, 139–140.

  45. Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 214.

  46. Ibid., 37–38.

  47. Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 38–40.

  48. Ibid., 215.

  49. Hasia R. Diner, Hungering For America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5.

  50. De Marees, Description of the Gold Kingdom, 168.

  51. Olaudah Equiano, “Traditional Igbo Religion and Culture” (1791), in Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton C. Sernett (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 13–14.

  52. Allen and Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition to The River Niger in 1841, 1968), 2:201.

  53. Ibid., 1:117.

  54. De Marees, Description of the Gold Kingdom, 181.

  55. [Africanus], “Remarks on the Slave Trade, and the Slavery of the Negroes,” in A Series of Letters (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 47.

  56. Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen, 5.

  2. ADDING TO MY BREAD AND GREENS

  1. Douglas Brent Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing He Country’: Africans, Afro-Virginians, and the Development of Slave Culture in Virginia, 1690–1810” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1996), 419.

  2. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 18, 20.

  3. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 20–21; Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing He Country,’” 410–412; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 4.

  4. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 27.

  5. Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 312.

  6. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1976), xv–xvii; Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), 66; Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions Into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 44; Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (New York: Crown, 1995); Helen Mendes, introduction to The African Heritage Cookbook (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

  7. Voyage of Don Manoel Gonzales (Late Merchant) of the City of Lisbon in Portugal, to Great Britain, about 1788, in John Pinkerton, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World. . . (London: Longman, Hurst, Ross, Orme and Brown, 1813), 2:86–87, 145.

  8. Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave from Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter (Milwaukee, Wisc.: South Side Printing, 1897), 49.

  9. Ibid., 144–145.

  10. The term “parochial food-traditions” comes from Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian food,” Social Identities 1, no. 1 (1995): 14.

  11. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 144–145.

  12. Voyage of Don Manoel Gonzales, in Pinkerton, A General Collection, 2:144–145; Young, A Tour of Ireland, in Pinkerton, A General Collection, 4:39.

  13. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 46; Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 124, 125, 128–129; Molly Harrison, The Kitchen in History (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 32.

  14. John Smith, “Descriptions of Virginia and Proceedings of the Colonie by Captain John Smith, 1612,” in Narratives of Early Virginia 1606–1625, ed. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, vol. 5 of Original Narratives of Early American History, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), 102; Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Food and the Making of Americans, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14–15; Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America, 2d ed. (1961; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 91, 93; Sophie D. Coe, America’s First Cuisines (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 36, 133, 149–150, 158.

  15. Coe, America’s First Cuisines, 7–8; Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 14–15; John Edgerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (New York: Knopf, 1987), 248–249; Maryellen Spencer, “Food in Seventeenth-Century Tidewater Virginia: A Method for Studying Historical Cuisines” (Ph.D. diss., Virginia Polytechnic Inst
itute and State University, 1982), 92.

  16. Spencer, “Food in Seventeenth-Century Tidewater Virginia,” 94–95.

  17. Driver, Indians of North America, 89–94, 91, 93, 94; Smith, “Descriptions of Virginia,” 96–97; Howard H. Peckham, ed., Narratives of Colonial America, 1704–1765, Lakeside Classics Series (Chicago: Donnelley and Sons, 1971), 92, 97, 99–101; Arthur Barlowe, “Captain Arthur Barlowe’s Narrative of the First Voyage to The Coasts of America,” in Early English and French Voyages Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534–1608, ed. Henry S. Burrage, vol. 3 of Original Narratives of Early American History, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Scribner’s, 1906), 235–236.

  18. Spencer, “Food in Seventeenth-Century Tidewater Virginia,” 94–95.

  19. Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing,’” 424–425.

  20. Alden Vaughn, America Before the Revolution, 1725–1775 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 19–20.

  21. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave . . . (Pittsburgh: J.T. Shryock, 1854), 20, 144–145.

  22. Ibid., 20, 177, 181,

  23. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 49.

  24. Mendes, African Heritage Cookbook, 23.

  25. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), x.

  26. William Byrd, The London Diary, 1717–1721, and Other Writings, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 16–17.

  27. Narayan, “Eating Cultures,” 14.

  28. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 541, 543. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 160–161; Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties (Sobrados e Mucambos): The Making of Modern Brazil, trans. and ed. Harriet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1963), 185–192.

  29. Byrd, The London Diary, 417–419; Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing,’” 421.

  30. Byrd, The London Diary, 439, 444, 484–485, 490.

  31. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974), 6–8.

  32. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 47–48.

  33. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1673), reprinted in After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Concerning the Slaves, Their Manners, and Customs in the British West Indies, ed. Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed, with Leslie Baker and Adrian Stackhouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 51–52.

  34. James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 129.

  35. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 20. See Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 96.

  36. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica, 3d ed. (London, 1740), reprinted in After Africa, 329. See John J. Stewart, Account of Jamaica, and Its Inhabitants: By a Gentleman, a Long Resident in the West Indies (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 231–232.

  37. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake, 62.

  38. J. B. Moreton, “Manners and Customs in the West India Islands” (London, 1790), reprinted in After Africa, 290.

  39. F. W. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies, 3d ed. (London, 1833), 69–71, 437–438, reprinted in After Africa, 305.

  40. Cynric Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica . . . (London, 1826), 21–27, 62–64, reprinted in After Africa, 251–252.

  41. Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen, 6.

  42. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 29.

  43. [Africanus], “Remarks on the Slave Trade, and the Slavery of the Negroes,” in A Series of Letters (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 47.

  44. Frank J. Klinberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau 1706–1717, University of California Publications in History, vol. 53, ed. J. S. Galbraith, R. N. Burr, Brainerd Dyer, and J. C. King (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 7.

  45. Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 7; see also 96.

  46. Larry Jean Ancelet, Jay D. Edwards, and Glen Pitre, with additional material by Carl Brasseux, Cajun Country (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 141–142.

  47. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762, ed. Elise Pinckney, with Marvin R. Zahniser (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 28.

  48. This interpretation was first suggested by Jessica B. Harris in Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking (New York: Atheneum, 1989), xvi; [Africanus], Remarks on the Slave Trade, 47.

  49. Jen Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews, with Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 296–297.

  50. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 20–21.

  51. Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 177.

  52. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating, 129.

  53. Ibid.

  3. HOG AND HOMINY

  1. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1976), 543.

  2. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States In the Years 1853–1854 (1856; reprint, New York: Knickerbockers, 1904).

  3. Adam Hodgson, Remarks During a Journey Through North America In the Years 1819, 1820, and 1821 in a Series of Letters (Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970, first edition, New York: Seymour, Printer, 1823), 117.

  4. Fredrika Bremer, America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer, ed. Adolph B. Benson (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924), 107–108.

  5. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based Upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the Same Author, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 80.

  6. Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (New York: Crown, 1995), 140.

  7. Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 143–144.

  8. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating, 90.

  9. Peter Randolph, “Plantation Churches: Visible and Invisible” (1893), in Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton C. Sernett (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 67.

  10. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 177, 219.

  11. John Edgerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (New York: Knopf, 1987), 37.

  12. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 212.

  13. Bremer, America of the Fifties, 114-115.

  14. Ibid., 120-123.

  15. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 224–225.

  16. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 163–164; Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, ed. Fletcher M. Green (1887; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1965), 151.

  17. Helen Mendes, The African Heritage Cookbook (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 60, 72.

  18. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev, ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 101.

  19. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 160–161; Gilbert
o Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties (Sobrados e Mucambos): The Making of Modern Brazil, trans. and ed. Harriet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1963), 185–192; Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1956), 128–129; Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 541, 543; Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815-1817, ed. Mona Wilson (London: George Routledge, 1929), 92, 196–197; John Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica; with Remarks on the Moral and Physical Condition of the slaves, and on the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies. (New York, Negro Universities Press, 1969 [first edition, 1823]), 268; Richard Robert Madden, A Twelve Month’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship: With Incidental Notices of the State of Society, Prospects, and Natural Resources of Jamaica and Other Islands (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835; reprint, West Port, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 70.

  20. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, xvi, xvii.

  21. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 71; see Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 112.

  22. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1987), 299–300.

  23. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 71.

  24. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 549; see 543.

  25. Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 143.

  26. Adèle Toussaint-Samson, A Parisian in Brazil: A Travel Account of a Frenchwoman in Nineteenth-Century Rio De Janeiro, ed. Emma Toussaint (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 30; Margarette Sheehan de Andrade, Brazilian Cookery: Traditional and Modern (Rio de Janeiro: A Casa Do Livro Eldorado, 1978), 54, 62–63.

  27. Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Back, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), 51, 69; James W. Steele, Cuban Sketches (New York: Putnam’s, 1881), 191–193.