The Cooking Gene

When I cook on a plantation, before I do anything else, I put on the representative clothes. I prefer the long rough trousers to breeches; either way, I’ll still feel the heat. Next come the long wool stockings, or more frequently cotton tights. Then the long shirt I barely wash that’s full of little tears and rips, the waistcoat, the kerchief. They call this a costume but it is my transformative historical drag; my makeup is a dusting of pot rust, red clay, and the ghost smells of meals past.

“Now we are slaves in the land of Egypt.” I tie the kerchief around my neck.

The smell of the burning wood becomes the smell of your clothes and your body. It gets down to the root of your hair follicles. Your sweat marries with the smokiness until every bacon lover in the world—from human to canine to feline—can’t resist you for at least thirty-six hours after cooking, three showers later. The hair on your arms singe off, and wisps of burned hair and the iron-laced smell of fresh blood drawn from cuts or meat, herbs, spices, onion, and earthy pungent roots mix to make for the most confusingly fragrant skin. The ringing in your ears always sounds like a beat on the door-frame, the tuning of the banjo, a misplucked fiddle.

I don’t know what kind of wood I’ll use or even if the dampness will make much of a difference, but the first task is always to get kindling and wood—thirty to forty pieces—and once you have it, get the fire started quickly and clearly so that the flames dance in the air like Pentecost. Resinous and juicy, the softwoods—the lightwood—start the show when I wrap them in a little cotton. I like burning a little raw cotton with the pine and her needles—it feels like poetic justice, my own little taste of revenge. I know that’s silly, but I am captive to blood memory visions of the cotton bales burning and the soldiers marching on and jubilee coming. Nothing ever really escapes memory, and even the things we forget often are condemned to it.

The hardwoods are like friends, and each one has a different conversation with your food—the smell, the burn, the coals, the heat, the smoke—the hot intensity of white oak; the savor of hickory; the mellowness of pecan, the red oak, ash, apple, and maples. Sometimes you have to split the big logs up so that you can stack them like a chimney. When that happens, the day begins with the brooding energy of iron and all of its accompanying West African spirits—Ogun, Ta Yao, Ndomayiri. I sing the song quoted by Fannie Berry, a formerly enslaved informant, to the WPA interviewers in the 1930s: “A cold and frosty morning / the niggers is feeling good / take ya’ ax upon ya’ shoulder and talk to the wood . . . talk [chop] . . . talk [chop] . . . talk [chop] to the wood . . . talk . . . talk . . . talk to the wood. Talk! Oh yeah! I’m talking, talking to the wood . . . Talk come talk to me, talk to me wood!” Like the recipes I work with, it starts off as a formula from the past, and ends—naturally—with my ad libs, improvisation and tradition chasing each other like fish rippling through a pool.

“N-word” and all, the song gives me an undefinable phantom pleasure. I’m giving energy to the wood I’m cooking with and starting the day the way my ancestors started their own—singing despite the drudgery. Before I started cooking this way, I didn’t know that you had to sing, and that it wasn’t a pastime. Every tool you touch becomes a scepter, and the way you start and finish the task opens and closes the doors of time. Visitors to the South before the Civil War spoke of enslaved men talking to their farming tools and axes and finishing the work with a part yodel, part cry—part prayer. Fannie Berry had her own moment of satisfaction in the southern Virginia Piedmont, hearing the axes fall and the voices rise through the oak-hickory forest and pines until the sun came up with our song. The songs are where the cooking begins—because it must.

You have to know a lot of songs to cook the way our ancestors cooked. The songs are like clocks with spells. Some enslaved cooks timed the cooking by the stanzas of the hymns and spirituals, or little folk songs that began across the Atlantic and melted into plantation Creole, melting Africa with Europe until beginnings and endings were muddied. My favorite is the ambiguous anthem of resistance and removal, “Many Thousands Gone.” “No more peck of corn for me, no more, no more / No more peck of corn for me, many thousands gone. / No more auction block for me, no more, no more / No more auction block for me, many thousands gone.”

When I started going to plantations, you would often hear tour guides (sometimes dressed like Southern belles in hoopskirts, or as fifty-year-old Confederate soldiers sausaged into uniforms) and docents talk—actually they joke—about the “whistling walk,” a path, often covered, leading from the outdoor kitchen to the Big House, the plantation house. Supposedly this was the space where “the slaves” had to whistle as they brought the food in, to prove they were not eating. It was actually just an old architectural covenvention, though, that prevented rain and bird droppings from getting into the food, but the old white men chuckle, the white ladies guffaw, and I feel my inner Nat Turner raging. They must giggle and grin because they think it’s quaint and tender as light biscuits to revisit in mind the Old South, where the pilfering nature of the tricky Negro was an accepted consequence of benign paternalism. In all of my days, I have been asked to prove everything I have ever said, but I have never heard a single one of these docents challenged for using racist folk history as fact. One day, improvisation chased tradition, and I started to sing a new song as I worked: No more whistling walk for me / No more, no more / No more whistling walk for me / Many thousands gone.

BURNING IT DOWN

The fire is easy if you know how to use a match or have banked coals. Screw flint and steel. I stack them up in a crisscross tower, gather dead-red pine needles and cones, raw cotton, and paper with a little bacon grease at the base, and set them alight, and the wood begins to crackle and flame. Anyone can turn on a stove, but this is a far more satisfying feeling. Out comes the fire-fan made from the gorgeous iridescent feathers plucked from the unwilling ass of a turkey, the kind of tool my father inherited from his great-grandfather, born enslaved in Appomattox County, Virginia, not that far from Fannie Berry herself. Start a fire, then keep it stoked; fan your fire and make it blaze, then tame it.

The plantations of the American South and other spaces associated with slavery have often been unwelcoming and dishonest spaces for African American visitors. The whistling walk was just one way of telling black visitors that their experience was superfluous and negligible. Still is. The American plantation wasn’t the quaint village community you saw depicted in your history textbook. It was a labor camp system for exiled prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping. In this light, it is no wonder many African Americans do not flock to but altogether avoid the plantation and urban sites where enslaved people—our ancestors—lived, worked, and died.

The body count alone marks the plantation as a sacred place, and yet that’s not what hallows the grounds to most. Traditionally, the plantation is a place where architecture and windows and wallpaper are lauded but the bodies who put them up are not. It is still marketed as the crux of the Old South, a place of manners, gentility, custom, and tradition; the South’s cultural apogee. It is where much of Southern culture was born, and that includes much of Southern food, and it is the place where, by and large, black America was born—and that’s precisely why I use the plantation as a place of reclamation.

Soul food (or “African American heritage cooking”) and its umbrella cuisine, Southern food, are the most remarked and most maligned of any regional or indigenous ethnic tradition in the United States. They are also big business and key to the aforementioned cultural tourism. Southern and soul foods are seen as unhealthy, self-destructive, and misguided, even as modern Southern chefs try to recast and reinvent the canon, emphasizing fresh ingredients, balance, and seasonality. And yet the arguments are not just about how much lard is too much. The connection between and heritage of both Southern and soul cuisines is hotly debated and arouses old racial stereotypes, prejudices, and cultural attitudes and intercultural misunderstandings. It’s an easy metaphor for the “two” Souths—one black, one white—intertwined and complicated. That storm of history—from Africa to America, slavery to freedom, Middle Passage to this, our now—is not trivia. It is in every cell of our bodies.

Today’s American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and self-worth. It’s a culture looking toward ecology, the regional flow of seasons, and opportunities for new ways to invigorate and color the American palate. Our new foodies are concerned with health, sustainability, environmental integrity, social justice, and the push-pull between global and local economies. Our food world is a charged scene of culinary inquiry continually in search of ancestors, historical precedent, and novel ways to explore tradition while surging forward. The chefs and culinarians of twenty-first-century America have become hungry for an origin story all our own.

The lofty goal of participation in the praise fest for rediscovering and sustaining America’s food roots seems trivial at best when going to your source is traumatic. The early and antebellum South is not where most African Americans want to let their minds and feet visit. It’s a painful place, and the modern South is just beginning to engage the relationship between the racial divide, class divisions, and cultural fissures that have tainted the journey to contemporary Southern cuisine. It’s an entangled and deeply personal mess that has been four centuries in the making. This book is about finding and honoring the soul of my people’s food by looking deep within my past and my family’s story.

There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in the traditions of your roots and use them to define your art and speak to any human being about who you are; your plate is your flag. Many of our most pungent memories are carried through food, just as connections to our ancestors are reaffirmed by cooking the dishes handed down to us. For some chefs, this bond is as easy as pointing to a Tuscan village or a Korean neighborhood, while others adopt the foods of culinary kinfolk outside their own background and use them to express their personal identity. Many take for granted their fast and easy connections to a food narrative that grounds them in a tradition, gives them a broad palette to explore, and affords them a genuine taste of eudaemonia, all of which is the holistic feeling of flourishing in life; and of course it is often blissfully apolitical.

I am at least the eighth, and in some cases the ninth, tenth, or twelfth generation of my family to be born in America. I say “America” because the term “United States” conveys politics but not dreams. There is no “United States dream,” but apparently there is an “American dream,” so I call out America with all due respect to all lands involved in the legacy of Amerigo Vespucci, as if his name above all others was perfect for naming places or dreams. If nothing else, it forces me to confront what “American” means and how I became one other than by nascence. I am an American by the consequence of the long path of slavery, migration, and the search to satisfy hungers—for sustenance, money, sexual gratification, racialized egos. Hunger pushed humanity across Africa and then out of Africa into the world, and ever since, humanity has found ways to push other humans to satisfy their hungers—until they drop.

There is being American and then there is being Southern, and when you move across its face, the South feels endless. For all its familiar tropes, there are multiple Souths, not just one, just as there are multiple ways of being Southern. The differences in the landscape are subtle, and like going from lover to lover, things seem to meld until names are meaningless. Another battlefield, another burial ground. Soulscapes and foodsteps and mysteries and myths. Then, before you know it, the stories begin to pile up like particles of clay and loam and sand until you can’t breathe. We Southerners are now as Vietnamese and Mexican and transgender as we were once Muskogean, Anglo-Celtic, Gallic, and fundamentalist. Add the exile of fifty-plus nations of Africa, and this is my heritage, and for some reason, I wrestle with it endlessly—how could I not; I have nothing else. I am African American, and for the majority of us, this is the genesis we freely share with the New South as we did with the Old.

The travels to discover my heritage revealed to me that the South might not be a place so much as it is a series of moments, which in proper composition communicate an indelible history that people cling to as horseshoes do to old barns. In cooking, the style of Southern food is more verb than adjective; it is the exercise of specific histories, not just the result. In food it becomes less a matter of location than of process, and it becomes difficult to separate the nature of the process from the heritage by which one acquired it. Southern cuisine is a series of geographic and gastronomic mutations made long ago by people whose fade into the earth provides half of the justification for why their descendants keep the process going at all. Our ancestry is not an afterthought; it is both our raison d’être and our mise en place, it is action and reaction.

FIGHTING OFF AMNESIA

APPRENTICES WANTED. One or two colored or black Girls will be taken as Apprentices, for a certain term of years, to the PASTRY BUSINESS, by a free colored woman, who is a complete Pastry Cook. Proper care will be taken of those placed with her. Apply at the fruit store, No. 81 East Bay.

—CHARLESTON COURIER (DECEMBER 2, 1830)

Therese Nelson, a dear friend and chef, and I are talking in her Harlem apartment. It’s crowded with cookbooks stacked to the ceiling. Therese is a passionate creative and learner, and we share a love of black culinary history. She runs a site and Facebook page that celebrate just that. For Therese, and many chefs of color, the classroom was not the place where they learned about themselves and the culinary past of the African American people. “Culinary schools, just like regular school growing up, don’t really teach you your history. You never heard about James Hemings or Hercules or Malinda Russell or Abby Fisher or anybody like that in any of your classes. Or Africa, or that the Caribbean or Brazil have anything to do with Africa, let alone the United States. Here I am trying to be an authentic American chef, which necessitates exploring my African heritage, and we didn’t get that in culinary school, and a lot of students still don’t.”

James Hemings. Currently championed by our fellow friends Chef Ashbell McElveen and culinary historian and sommelier Tonya Hopkins through the newly founded James Hemings Foundation, James Hemings is the household name that should have been that never was. “When I was growing up, I remember all these books talking about what Jefferson did for the American table, and he did make contributions, but he outsourced a lot of his learning to the people who worked on his plantations as his cooks. James Hemings, Edith Fossett, Fanny Hern; they have French training, but then there are these African and Native American ingredients and flavors, and all of it—England, West Africa, and indigenous food—is getting mixed up in their hands. And the thing is, it’s not just them. It’s generations of black cooks like Solomon Northup’s wife—she’s illiterate but she’s conversant in haute cuisine. A lot of fine restaurants have a pedigree of having black chefs, cooks, whatever you want to call them, powering their kitchens. Delmonico’s, Gage and Tollner, North and South, we were there,” says Tonya.

Indeed we were. James Hemings (1765–1801) was a “bright mulatto” from Albemarle County, Virginia, who died at his own hand in Baltimore at the age of thirty-six. He is the brother of Sally Hemings, who will go down in history as the mother of Jefferson’s African American children. From the same region that would later produce the indomitable Edna Lewis, the author of The Taste of Country Cooking, known as “the South’s Julia Child,” James Hemings saw the birth of the United States and was, without much exaggeration, its most accomplished and educated chef. Accompanying his slaveholder to Paris when he is nineteen, James is officially free the minute he hits French soil during Jefferson’s ambassadorship. However, his whole world is atop the mountain known as Monticello, including his mother and siblings. The mountain was a complicated place. His late young mistress was his half sister, Martha; long before Paris, blood and culture lines had already been crossed.

James, “at great cost” to Jefferson, is tutored in French and goes to work in some of the best kitchens Paris and Versailles have to offer. He suffers through being yelled at in a language he gradually gains fluency in and acquires skills that are being snuffed out as America is handed the complete reins of racial chattel slavery—he is multilingual, he is traveled, he can read, and he can write. Jefferson gives him a salary and extra money. He looks every bit the part of a talented chef. He is a cook worthy not only of a plantation kitchen, but of French royalty itself. Many of the foods that Jefferson is credited with introducing to the American diet are in fact learned and translated under James’s hand. They worked in concert with each other to develop the kitchen that Jefferson wanted, the reward upon training his brother Peter being James’s emancipation. On February 5, 1796, a black man received his freedom and became an American professional chef.

“James’s story and Edna Lewis’s story and everybody in between 1776 and 1976—these early black cookbook authors and famous chefs and enslaved chefs and free men and women of color who owned taverns and catered in Philadelphia and Washington—those are our ancestors,” Therese says. “We need to know where we come from.” Therese’s own roots are in Newark, New Jersey. She is the second generation born up North to a family with roots in Latta, South Carolina. “We went down for reunions every summer. My grandmother talked about not being able to go to school until the tobacco harvest was over, but I never really heard them talk much about segregation, and just about nothing from slavery time. Put all of that together from not learning my history at school, and only knowing a little bit from home, and I felt fraudulent because I didn’t know my roots, I didn’t know where to start.” She looks at me intently. “We need a blueprint as individuals and as a people. We live in a puzzle where the pieces don’t even fit together. We need a path so we can put it all together again.”

My Southern credentials once came from rattling off “home places” in my presentations as if I had been to all of them, seen the counties and creeks and courthouses. Some I had, some I had not. Phenix City and Seale, Alabama; Prospect, Virginia; Lancaster, South Carolina; Halifax County, North Carolina; Athens, Georgia; Tennessee; Mississippi; New Orleans . . . the list kept getting longer and longer as I added up all the spots and stops that led to me—crumbling kitchens, rotting auction blocks, graveyards iced in asphalt. With each deterioration, I was becoming someone fading from who I was and where I came from, just in time for the rest of the world to catch amnesia with me. I began to have the urge to see the places, imagine the ancestors whose lives I could barely know otherwise, and taste the food.

My entire cooking life has been about memory. It’s my most indispensable ingredient, so wherever I find it, I hoard it. I tell stories about people using food, I swap memories with people and create out of that conversation mnemonic feasts with this fallible, subjective mental evidence. Sometimes they are people long gone, whose immortality is expressed in the pulp of trees also long gone and in our electronic ether. Other times they are people who converse with me as I cook as the enslaved once cooked, testifying to people and places that only come alive again when they are remembered. In memory there is resurrection, and thus the end goal of my cooking is just that—resurrection.

Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots and routes, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia about other people and how food affected their lives as proxy for the stories in my own bloodline and body. This made for really uncomfortable armor. It never really fit me right. These were other people’s tales and paths—not my own. I began to wonder if I ever really would be able to locate myself in the human experience. What good is it to learn the flow of human history and to speak of the dead if their stories don’t speak to you? What of food history and facts and figures and flashpoints? What good is your own position as a culinary historian if you can’t find yourself in the narrative of your food’s story, if you don’t know who you are?

6:30 A.M., READYING THE POTS

No matter where I am the next work involves the pots. Most of my cooking spans from 1730 to 1880, the generations of my family from when I estimate the greatest number arrived from Africa, to the end of Reconstruction, and fortunately for me, open-hearth cookery in that time doesn’t change much. Clunky Dutch ovens (an old legend says if you treat it wrong it will use its legs to run away) and rusty lids, leggy spider skillets, and tin kitchens that look like incomplete George Foreman rotisseries, and lots and lots of wooden spoons and ladles that give me the feeling of being a sorcerer. You have to have imagination to cook this way—first, to put yourself outside of your own time; second, to believe that what you are actually doing is a form of magic. My favorite tool to hate is the waffle iron with its exacting timing and choreographed dance of greasing, heating, pouring in batter, counting seconds, flipping it, counting again, then removing it gently as not to mar a single inch of cake.

If the pots and utensils are not clean, I scrub the pots free of any rust, bug carcasses, or mouse scat. In goes a little boiling water, out goes the water; they dry near the fire; and then comes the grease inside and out until all of the pot is covered. It boils on the pot until it creates a filmy screen blocking the possibility of rust. Dutch ovens, skillets, saucepans, gridirons, stewpans, spit racks, griddles, spatulas, and meat forks—all of this eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Westernness, a far cry from the simpler ensemble of Africa’s pot on three stones—must be seasoned lest the food taste of metal and dust, giving off an unsavory essence reminiscent of old blood.

The West and central African cooks—my grandmothers—had a much simpler plan. They set a pot on three stones; earthen pottery made by women in the days before anyone knew what a white person was, versus the cast-iron pots from England for which one of my ancestors may well have been traded. This wasn’t just practical; it was their symbol of the universe. Just as the planet seemed to hover in the hands of the Creator, the pot was propped up, and earth, stone, fire, air, and water joined together to bring sustenance. The little hearth—located under heaven or a thatch structure or building used during the rainy season—was itself a ritual space, an altar, a face of spirits, usually a female entity representing motherhood and nurture, the pot itself a kind of womb. To be certain, many of us cooked this way in the slave quarters in our swept yards and at the edges of the fields.

“What’s the best thing you ever cooked?” I asked my mother.

“A little black boy named Michael; I cooked him long and slow,” she replied.

The metaphor outlasted the women who stirred pots like that, living on in the hearts of our mothers—the notion that cooking and eating were chasing each other. Eating and ingesting—plays on modest terminology for sexual intimacy and conception, followed by more cooking—the preparation and crucible of the womb where the next generation is made. Blood memory? In the genes? Where did we get all this from, this complicated blend of Africa, America, and the West, these Atlantic bodies and selves?

I know there is no such thing as a “racial” “cooking gene.” Let’s get that straight. I am not one to indulge in too much biological essentialism; that can be very, very, very tricky as a black, gay, Jewish guy. “Don’t talk about dry bones around an old woman,” the Igbo of Nigeria say. However, I wonder if blood memory, which I do believe in, contains some clause for the ability not to burn water. For generations, when black cooks were enslaved they were called “born cooks,” our ability to slay in the kitchen considered a genetic ability rather than a combination of circumstance, nurture, and personal choice and ability. Only now that cooking with a story becomes a jackpot and an ideational diamond mine does this particular branding of people of color become conspicuously quiet, and there is something unmistakably peculiar about that.

And yet there is another part to all this genetic stuff. If you’re African American, the urge to know your parts and origins is intense. It has become in the past few years nothing short of a national passion. At first, in the shadow of Alex Haley’s Roots, it was a quest to embrace family histories that were largely quiet to obfuscate the grief of being oppressed. Then it was the dream of getting back to Africa and repairing the links destroyed or corrupted by slavery. Now there is a full-on movement in genetic genealogy, and black people are leading the vanguard. Four hundred years after 1619, the fire to understand where we come from and to retrieve the valuable parts of our heritage has not gone out.

What does it mean if the person staring back at me from my reflection in an iron pot full of water identifies as a cook, as black, and descendant of the enslaved? Who is this staring back at me? If I could identify where my ancestors came from given genealogy, genetics, and guesses, then I could pinpoint my food heritage and chart a journey across the globe. I could identify the parts of Africa where the men and women who produced me came from, and look at the traditions from Europe and America they came into contact with as genes mixed—by choice and by force.

I’ve never been satisfied with the generic narrative. It profits me nothing to be a culinary orphan of the West sans pedigree. We Africans in the Americas have not just been adopters, we are border crossers and culture benders. We have always been at play with what was presented to us. The Atlantic world has been an incredible experiment in how an enslaved population could get away with enslaving the palates of the people who enslaved them. From Boston to Bahia, the black cook—enslaved or free—was second to none. To go beyond assumptions; to interrogate our pain; to see the faces of my ancestors, to cook with them, to know them intimately the only way I can know them after decades of memory loss—those are my paths.

8:00 A.M., INGREDIENTS AND MISE EN PLACE

The old cookbooks or “receipt” (recipe) books so lauded in the world of early American and proto-Southern food get a vote but not a veto with me. I am not the white plantation owner’s wife reading the recipes aloud after her reverse journey down the whistling walk. I am the enslaved hearing the recipe, or already knowing it and just humoring Big Missy. There are many things in those books that are not African in conception, spirit, delivery, or form. On the other hand, there are many things that are African or Afro-Creole—okra soup, barbecue, red rice or tomato pilau, pepper pot, fried chicken, peanut soup, and the like. The European dishes full of Native American ingredients were changed by black hands, and in reverse you can see how the West and central African dishes with African and Eurasian and Native ingredients were toned down for European American palates. In these books you can feel the culinary birth pangs of America. North and South, the black cook was the midwife of something new.

So they are all there—Mary Randolph, Annabella Hill, Elizabeth Lea, Lettice Bryan, Hannah Glasse; Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky housewives; Creole gastronomic manuals, copies of pages from receipt and commonplace books written in fading ink from long-gone plantations, old British classics, and cookbooks that look back on the nostalgia of having the power to own a black cook. In the middle—the few books we have by black folks born into slavery who were cooks—Abby Fisher, Malinda Russell, Rufus Estes, Tunis Campbell. Most are not fat at all. Some are fully annotated with instructions on how to be a good servant and how to set a table, how to serve, how to dispense with the dishes and transition from one part of the evening to the next.

In our own time we have the voices of Edna Lewis, Austin Leslie, Sallie Ann Robinson, Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, Sylvia Woods, Leah Chase, and many others. The white women of the far past, writing and reading in days when it was illegal for much of their enslaved chattel to do the same, held in check by the voices of emancipated cooks and women whose grandparents cooked using the same methods they had seen their grandparents, the last generation born and raised in slavery, do. The last part comes from the formerly enslaved themselves, including emancipatory narratives written or communicated by men and women who had successfully escaped, or the 3,500-plus recorded oral histories of men and women born in slavery who were liberated in 1865 and were interviewed during the Depression as part of the oral history efforts of the Works Progress Administration. An incalculable wealth of knowledge about food and slavery was rescued with this single effort.

It inspired me to harvest the memories and seeds and recipes that travel within my family, and anyone else I could find. Nothing lacks importance; no detail is to be left behind. Our stories and our parents’ and grandparents’ stories—and even beyond to their parents’ and great-grandparents’ stories—are precious in a world where the narrative of who we are and were usually lasts no more than three generations. I have spent just as much time with the living as with the dead, collecting their stories and comparing and contrasting them in hopes of a consensus.

I had to commit to doing. To be able to say that I cook in the tradition of the Old South, to the cooking of kitchens high and low, is to affirm that I didn’t just read about it distilled on a page. There is no armchair in this work. In cooking, your informed imagination fills in the blanks. The dead and the living cook with me, and things once forgotten come to life. George Washington Carver once said, “If you love something enough it will give up its secrets to you.”

STILL LIFE

I have always admired the work of the Dutch masters—kitchen tables and marketplace stalls spilling over with food often in veiled references to a uniquely Protestant spirituality and sense of mortal urgency. Crisscrossed fish tails and sausages on high; and on the ground, rotten fruit, once vain and gorgeous, lying in a putrid state. As much as I love the attempt to cram cardoons and skirret into a painting with religious meaning, it’s the larded quails and bubbling pots that catch my eye. These same motifs transferred well to plantation scenes where enslaved men and women are surrounded by the groaning table and wisps of smoke.

The still-life paintings are the way in to many of the foods of the past. A gargantuan ear of Maryland gourdseed corn, a ruddy sweet potato, a horn-shaped okra, and watermelons that burst with juice—all pour out of early American paintings apprehending the early African American influence. Then there are the people—sometimes our ancestors are shadows, and other times they are front and center. I am the man in the waistcoat and trousers, the billowy shirt surrounded by complicated and ugly produce and foul smells and spices that cut through rain on red clay. I am the new still life—a black man standing on the brick floor feeling the flames lick and the smoke choke, surrounded by the plantation larder.

I have put myself in a world of edible antiques. The food that we have received is not the same as that which our ancestors knew. I once had no clue what an heirloom vegetable was, or a heritage fruit or breed, and I didn’t know that the foraging that I loved to do per my grandparents’ instructions had the cute little moniker “wildcrafting.” My first “historic” foodways demo used anything and everything that gets buried in a landfill or takes thousands of years to disintegrate. I was going for expediency, not accuracy; I had children to teach. I was quickly warned away from this.

Get the pots and the spoons and something to put the food in and eat it from and eat it with. Next came the food. I would have to learn to maneuver the cooking utensils of old and learn how to keep time as I cooked. I lost arm hair and eyebrows, a little blood here and there; I was scalded and branded, burned and seared. These are the marks of my tribe.

I had to learn an entirely new language of measurements—gills (1/2 cup), teacups (3/4 of a cup), drams, jiggers, wineglasses, and pecks. A peck was two gallons of dry cornmeal, or about the amount of food a full hand working on a plantation received per day. This was a world of bushels and hogsheads and barrels and casks. A world full of people unlearned but trained to note on sight distance or volume.

The pots are extremely heavy when filled with water. One event involved cooking at a kitchen until darkness settled, with one modern light and a few candles. I struggled to get the massive pot, filled with water, to the fire. Then I tripped over something near the fire, sending a bit of the water spilling into it. The large group of visitors for the plantation Christmas event, almost completely white, thought this was rather funny. Nobody asked me if I was all right, and most shook their heads in amusement. I have never been so angry at one of these events. I wanted to tell them that if a slaveholder saw fit, an enslaved person in a house could be sold, beaten, or in a few extremely rare but gruesome cases, like an incident in Martinique, cooked alive in an oven for an imperfect cake.

Some people were certainly amused by my path at first. Some thought I’d never make it—but I was just enthusiastic, not daft. One woman challenged me at an early appearance atop Monticello as to whether the fish peppers I was seeding were annum or chinense. It was a trick question—most peppers are annum. Instead of pretending to know, I looked it up. She was not amused, as if my ignorance, which was quickly self-corrected, was an affirmative action dagger with which she had been stabbed. In resistance, I went home and, in the example of Malcolm X in jail, began writing down every single possible animal and plant species used by enslaved people as food, and began to memorize their scientific names. Sus scrofa, Gallus domesticus, Diospyros virginiana, Brassica oleracea var. acephala, Citrullus vulgaris . . . music to my newbie ears.

I’ve gotten used to being challenged on every fact or word that comes out of my mouth. I am not white, and white men and women make up the majority of credentialed experts in this field. I am often the only person of color on a panel, or one of a handful of people of color at conferences on historical foodways and horticultural practices. I am used to being seen as a smack-talking blowhard who thinks he knows but knows nothing—those seeds were planted in those early presentations—but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I reached out to the lions of the field.

Because of the work of a varied cast of characters ranging from plant and horticulture enthusiasts like heirloom vegetable gurus William Woys Weaver and Benjamin Watson, and heritage fruit expert Tom Burford, to historical landscape scholars like Peter Wood of Monticello and Wesley Greene of Colonial Williamsburg, I was able to enter a world that until very recently was off the radar of most American eaters. This work is complicated by the searching and plumbing of David Shields and Glenn Roberts and others who have sought to bring old field crops to life and reinvigorate their place in the Southern diet. None of them are black; that is not to say they must be black, but as far as passion and love of the knowledge will take them, not one of these figures can look at their family tree and imagine in their mind’s eye an enslaved person munching on Green Glaze collards or Sea Island red field peas or Carolina Gold rice middlins (broken rice reserved for the enslaved).

It’s this particular argument about the importance of being able to have that connection that has often gotten me into trouble. It’s not that I want them to be African American. I just think there is a measure of gravitas in black people looking at the same food culture and not only learning important general information but being able to see themselves. This is greater than the intrinsic value of knowing where our food comes from and rescuing endangered foods. That Lost Ark-meets-Noah’s-ark mentality is intellectually thrilling and highly motivational, but it pales in comparison to the task of providing economic opportunity, cultural and spiritual reconnection, improved health and quality of life, and creative and cultural capital to the people who not only used to grow that food for themselves and others, but have historically been suppressed from benefiting from their ancestral legacy.

So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound. I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.

The food is in many cases all we have, all we can go to in order to feel our way into our past. For others, we are an interesting note on the pages of a very different conversation. For African Americans and our allies, food is the gateway into larger conversations about individual and group survival. Ron Finley, an African American food activist from South Central LA, speaks of “drive-thrus killing more black people than drive-bys.” Vacant lots in Detroit and Milwaukee, Atlanta, Athens, and Baltimore are being turned into urban agriculture spaces in neighborhoods where fresh produce and jobs are scarce. While other communities might seem only passively interested in their histories, genes, and genealogies—the African American people struggle between nihilism, passing interest, activism, and obsession—and more often than not these are found not only within the same social circles or households, but within the minds and hearts of black individuals when they look at their relationship to their past.

This reconnection meant I had to take myself back to botany and anatomy classes—one student, one teacher: me. I studied parts of plants and bones so that I could accurately describe in the jargoniest of jargon every single species-specific part from petiole to scapula, from tibia to sepal. Okra was no longer just okra; it became a member of the mallow family domesticated in the ancient Sahel, while it was still verdant and predictably rich, crowned in Linnean-speak Abelmoschus esculentus—a mucilaginous vegetable, actually a fruit whose mucopolysaccharides help okra act as a lubricant for the body to expunge that which it no longer needs.

Beyond the language of science came a litany of old-time names for the same parts of the plants and animals I began to work with—chines and trotters and jowls; potherbs and sprouts. Then came knowing the signs to plant, both in the heavens and in nature—waxing moons, waning moons; oak leaves as big as baby squirrels’ ears; nights cold enough to gauge the rightness of the hog butchering, or a frost so killing it turned persimmons into sugarplums. Winter is possum time, late autumn is raccoon time, late summer and early autumn are squirrel time, spring is rabbit time. You must know a nice catfish from a muddy one, and count on the guinea hens to be too lean.

Each vegetable has its own timing; each smell and sound is part of your internal timer. I have gone from burning things by following the books’ instructions to being able to tell from a feeling in my stomach when the rolls were perfect or the fried chicken was done, crispy and beautiful on the outside and clear juices in the middle. There is a relationship you develop with your food that is built on practice and experience, but also on the feeling that you bring to your pots. They know you because pots have souls—at least that’s what I’m told. Pots are to African and African Diaspora mythology what bottles are to genies in the Middle East. They are like shells for hermit crabs—the pots contain wisdom and the dead—and if you don’t treat them right you might just watch one run off down the road.

Magical realism aside, there is a magic in being able to take the hot coals and shovel them above and below and cook something and break the expectations of the people you cook for. Equally powerful is imagining that twelve-course meals were once made using only fire, iron, copper, wood, flint, clay, and pewter. Cooks built their reputation on this ancient, common way. Men and women who had ancestors who only used a pot on three stones were now in command of a Western cuisine with African influences, flourishes, and aesthetics. I can’t stir a single pot without remembering or acknowledging that—this is where our power was.

MARCHING AS TO WAR

I bring all of this into the historical kitchen with me: politics and race, sexuality and spirituality, memory, brokenness, repair, reclamation and reconciliation, and anger. I bring in moments from my own childhood and wince sometimes at the feelings of mourning and pain I get from them. Moments of shame and failure, moments of incredible love and affection. Before these were my grandmother’s hands. I was trained to use my hands to measure as accurately as possible dry ingredients; to this day I can give you any teaspoon or tablespoon or cup measurement you want by just holding my hands a certain way.

My mother gave me three lifetimes of scoldings and sayings that still swirl around me every time I cook: “Integrity in the kitchen!” (Always wash your hands, keep things clean, clean as you go.) “RTFM—Read the F——Manual.” (Don’t ignore the instructions or order of the recipe—it’s there for a reason. Learn the formula first and then you can experiment, not the other way around.) “Save the best for company.” (Give yourself the half-burned, off-looking stuff—always give the best to your guests.)

It was the way I held my hands when I stirred things in a bowl—I remember the pain of having my hand yanked into position and held in the exact bend it took to properly incorporate moisture into a dry mix. It was my father asking me to describe the perfect color of barbecued meat, and when I replied “a pecan-colored brown,” my father smiled with satisfaction (a rare look if you know my father) and said, “I like that color, son.” It was being kicked out of the kitchen innumerable times for not complying with the exact instructions of the presiding adult. It was sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table waiting to be her official taster and unofficial sous.

It is not enough to know the past of the people you interpret. You must know your own past. I’m in the clothes that call to mind what the enslaved wore, making food like the enslaved made for themselves and their slaveholders. I am in plantation kitchens that are haunted to the rafters in places that few African Americans dare to tread. I watch ghosts walk by, and among them is me. I am seeing myself at seven, at thirteen, twenty-one, thirty, now. I am stirring the pot wondering, How exactly did I get here?

Kitchen Pepper

Goes in everything in place of just pepper.

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

1 tsp ground white pepper

1 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tsp ground mace

1 tsp ground Ceylon cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp ground allspice

1 tsp ground ginger

Mix together, store in a cool place.

Fish Pepper Sauce

15 to 20 fish peppers

Kosher salt

4 cups apple cider vinegar or rum

Take fish peppers, and cut off the tops and tips of the pods. A few peppers, say 5 or so, should be hopped to a pulp in a food processor. Add a pinch or two of salt. Take this pulp and place at the bottom of a jar. The rest of the peppers can be sliced down the middle, exposing the seeds, or left whole. Place them on top of the pulpy mixture and cover in the bottle with apple cider vinegar or rum. Shake well and let steep 2 to 3 weeks before using.

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