"The cook should be an educated professional…I believe they could be more easily obtained and kept in order and discipline if they were Negroes, who are natural cooks generally."
"TO TRAIN NEGRO COOKS: BLACK MAMMY MEMORIAL INSTITUTE TO BE ESTABLISHED IN GEORGIA: Athens, Ga. Sept. 23—Application has been filed for a charter for the "Black Mammy Memorial Institute," to be located here, having for its object the training of young Negro men and women in the culinary and other domestic arts."—Major W.F. Spurgin, "How to Feed the Solider," Journal of the Military Service Institution, 1888
Bertelsen then calls for us to abandon racial essentialism, recalling the language of white commentators from the early 20th century, who attributed natural ability to the Black cook. She writes, "[Implying] cooking is in their DNA is akin to saying that all blacks are great dancers and musicians."Wow. Debunked myths of magical cooking Negroes, moonlights and magnolias, oh my. Add to that my DNA, and this is where it gets personal and real.As a culinary historian myself, I have to do the hard work of justifying my research. I have spent the past decade in historical interpretation and living history, delving into the food world of my enslaved ancestors, coming as close as I can to them, dish by dish, hearth by hearth. I have traveled the South armed with genealogies and family trees in tow, with DNA evidence of my ancestors' sojourn in and out of slavery, and the legacy of mixed bloodlines: African, European, and Native American. This is the precarious part. I have gone where trauma permits only a select number of African Americans to tread.I am no proponent of racial determinism. That's not what this is about. It's about having the courage to move past lazy and uncritical assumptions in search of something useful.
"Miss Lewis's English culinary heritage is glaringly apparent not only in her cookbooks, but also in the cookbooks written by Virginia aristocrats such as Mary Randolph, as well as in a multitude of other cookbooks, many imported from England to the American colonies in large numbers. These books would have been crucial in providing the material passed on to slave cooks. Preserving, pastry, baking were not techniques nor traditions in African cuisines, so the chief place where slave cooks, and indentured servants for that matter, learned these methods came from the kitchens of women such as Martha Jefferson, who—in a well-documented and much-quoted anecdote—was remembered in the memoirs of a slave named Isaac Jefferson as reading out recipes to his mother, an enslaved cook of the Jefferson family. In many cases, the mistress of the house actually measured out all the ingredients used daily by the cooks, as did Sally Baxter Hampton at Woodlands Plantation close to Columbia, South Carolina. This speaks of very tight control."
The first problem with this paragraph is that it is misleading. Speaking for my own work, I have written several extensive published pieces about Edna Lewis, all of which have noted that she lived in the same region where the kitchens of Madison, Jefferson, and the Randolph in-laws had their flourished. That inflorescence is a two-way street, and all of the food eaten on those plantations came to table through the labor of an extensive network of enslaved people. To my knowledge, no one to has ever claimed that blancmange or damson preserves came from Africa—not even Edna Lewis. Yet we are hit with the next claim that preservation and baking were not African when "preserving, pastry and baking" were certainly extant techniques in traditional Africa; the latter two become amplified after contact with the Portuguese and French, in particular in the settlements near slave castles. Preserving methods—necessary to food production since the beginning of humankind, which incidentally also began in Africa—including drying, smoking, salting, spicing, and burying foods, are without question endemic to the African continent.Some gentry women might have instructed enslaved cooks in food preparation by reading to them or measuring ingredients, but this version of history privileges white interaction with enslaved people in the least common scenario (gentry planters were the minority of slaveholding families) and frames the scene only from the viewpoint of the white "mistress." Slavery was colloquial and discretionary—nobody can paint slavery with a brush broad enough to illustrate the entire story. Also, are we really to believe that in every situation where enslaved people were cooks, the white woman was measuring ingredients and dictating the terms of the Southern kitchen every day? Wouldn't that have obviated the need for cookbooks for people who had never done much (or any) cooking during or after the war?—Cynthia Bertelsen, "Edna Lewis and the Mythology Behind Modern Southern Food"
This brings me to another problem with Bertelsen's argument: the mistaken assumption that creolization was a linear process by which African culture was diluted from a "pure" form. Like most African Americans, I have ancestors who arrived across three centuries in different blocs of ethnic groups brought to distinct regions of the southeastern coast. In other words, I have ancestors who were here in the 17th century in Virginia, in the mid- to late 18th century in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and the tens of thousands who arrived during the last burst of the slave trade in the early 19th century. All of these people integrated themselves into already established Black populations while simultaneously relating to different groups of Europeans in different stages of acculturation. In the African Atlantic world, each culture in enslavement became creative with concealing power and preserving their culture in plain sight. Whenever the culture of Africans was agreeable to the white powers that be or was parallel to already accepted custom or tradition, it had staying power—especially in food.We live in a world where many people want us to forget slavery in a way that no other people have been asked forget the historical traumas that have shaped their destiny. Bertelsen didn't suggest we forget its destructive power, nor did she say that Africans and African Americans haven't made contributions to Southern foodways, but her piece suggests we should stay with the tertiary role we have traditionally been assigned—a side piece rather than an entrée.Let's recognize the humanity of the Black cook and the judgment and vision of African and Afri-Creole cooks and their descendants in selection and judging food appearance, aesthetics, flavors, and choices. They were discerning minds, not machines, no matter what cuisine they were preparing. We exalt our culinary ancestors Emeline Jones, Aunt Sukey, James Hemings, Thomas Dorsey, Pierre Augustin, Perrine, Hercules, Nat Fuller, Tom Tully, Aunt Lucy, Abby Fisher, Malinda Russell, Rufus Estes, Uncle Emmanuel, and my great great great grandmother Jane Lewis and my great great grandfather Elijah Mitchell, not only because they passed on to us precious parts of African civilization that were nearly lost, but because they had command of the cuisine of the master class and then used their skill in the kitchen to master them.There is no culinary reverse racism going on here—not with the departed or the living. None of the major players in this discussion—Toni Tipton Martin, Leni Sorensen, Jessica Harris, Edda Fields-Black, Judith Carney, Adrian Miller, Therese Nelson, Tonya Hopkins, Ashbell Mcelveen or myself—has ever made outrageous claims of cultural hegemony to feel good. We aren't allowed to. We are put on the block and made to answer for our claims each and every time. I simply ask that Bertelsen, whose heart is in the right place, but whose pen in this essay was apparently not, should have to answer for hers.In the words of art historian Robert Farris Thompson, "Until you know how African you are, you will never know how American you are."Whenever the culture of Africans was agreeable to the white powers that be or was parallel to already accepted custom or tradition, it had staying power—especially in food.