Last summer I attended a Chow Chow festival event (a culinary event that celebrates the food culture of the Southern Appalachian Mountains) about Malinda Russell, the author of the first known cookbook by a Black American author. I was working the event as a volunteer for the Organic Grower’s School (Asheville, NC), behind a table selling T-shirts and water bottles, and handing out flyers. The attendees were foodies, locals, and visitors to Asheville, NC, who had paid $150 a ticket to eat nine courses prepared by a few of the hottest celebrity chefs in town, and to hear a panel of historians and cookbook authors discuss Russell’s cooking, her life, and the importance of her recently rediscovered 1866 text, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen.
The African roots of food we eat in the United States is a subject I became aware of gradually. In my hometown in Lowcountry South Carolina, we were served rice and gravy with fried chicken and green beans every Thursday in the high school cafeteria. My Asian immigrant mother fed us greens, fish, and rice almost daily, but when I left home I came to understand the turnip or mustard greens or collards and rice we ate in local “meat and three” restaurants drew from African, not Asian traditions. Only later did I see that what I understood as a uniquely Southern food, turnip tops without the roots, was originally the unwanted half of the crop that enslaved Africans were allowed to eat, and a substitute for leafy greens their ancestors had prepared and eaten back home.
As a bona fide foodie myself, a farmer, and a Southerner, I pricked up my ears when I heard from friends that Netflix had a documentary on African-American cuisine called High on the Hog. I watched one or two episodes of this surprisingly moving series. But besides kids shows and March Madness, I’m not much for TV, and so I recently found myself picking up the source text by Jessica B. Harris instead. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was published in 2011. Part memoir, history lesson, and cookbook, it reads like a picaresque biography of multiple subjects, making lemonade out of a hard life in the early, middle, and present-day U.S.
Harris has published multiple African-American cuisine-focused cookbooks and worked for years as a travel editor for Essence magazine. In this book, she writes with an engaging, narrative style as she travels to Africa and throughout the U.S. on an exploration of culinary and cultural connections. Harris draws expertly from original texts to tell stories of Black cooks and chefs, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and controversial luminaries, from pre-Columbian Africa to the America of Down Home with the Neelys on the Food Network.
Harris brings to life historical figures like Hercules, the much-esteemed head chef of President George Washington who eventually escaped from Mount Vernon; and James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s Black chef who trained in Paris and ran the famed kitchens of Monticello. After his stay in revolutionary France, Hemings petitioned Jefferson for his freedom, and was granted it on the condition that he remain in servitude until he had trained a satisfactory replacement.
Harris answers questions you may have never thought to ask about plantation rations and various historical approaches to feeding enslaved people. She memorably and devastatingly quotes from WPA-era oral histories and contemporary journal entries. Harris details complex alternative food economies that developed in enslaved communities: men and women who gardened, fished and hunted after hours, and then sold or bartered the surplus. In cities like Charleston, SC, some enslaved laborers wore metal badges registered to their owners as they sold produce or worked skilled trades for hire.
Harris is a natural storyteller. She evokes the soundscapes of early U.S. cities with Black food vendors hawking “fine Rocka-a-way clams” in NYC, and Charleston peddlers, whose loud cries gave the streets a distinctly African feel and inspired irate letters to the newspaper editor. She touches on the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, a convention- defying woman who went West, and parlayed her culinary skills and business acumen into a real estate fortune in post-Gold Rush San Francisco. She introduces us to Harlem’s “Pig Foot Mary,” whose legal name was Lillian Haris Dean. She quotes The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, who as a young writer had conducted WPA interviews in the 1920s and 30s. One of Ellison’s fictional characters from the novel lives in Harlem and is briefly transported to his Southern past with the smell of a street vendor’s baked yams.
Harris wraps up her narrative with a brief foray into the modern politics of African-American food. She takes us through the civil rights actions at a lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, and describes the strict no-pork policy of the Nation of Islam. She points to Alex Haley’s 1977 autobiography Roots, and the subsequent television series, giving license to Americans of African descent to explore the bounty and traditions of their heritage. Travel to West Africa by the diaspora boomed at this time, and in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, Black tourists discovered familiar tastes and culinary connections in a homeland their ancestors were forced to leave. I got the sense that Harris’s own journey began around this era.
Harris’s candid, personal style of writing and focus on extraordinary people makes the often harsh and bitter hardships in her subject matter easier to digest. Whether you watched High on the Hog or not, there is plenty to sink your teeth into here. The book concludes with an index of names and subjects, a formidable bibliography for further reading, and naturally, a few dozen recipes.
Yassa au Poulet: marinated lemon and chili chicken, grilled and poached in sauce, was mouth-watering. I’ll leave it to other readers to kitchen test “Possum and Sweet Potatoes”.
Mary Saunders Bulan was RAFI-USA’s Farmer Services Director.