What kind of food did slaves eat

Twitty, a writer and historian who documents his culinary creations and experiences via his acclaimed blog, Afroculinaria, saw a unique opportunity to show audiences a side of the region's food that isn't white-washed. According to Twitty, historical accounts of Southern cooking often gloss over slaves' diets—which the historian argues were the backbones of the cuisine.

It was just straight up a very bland, neutral version of history," he says. While Dierkshede acknowledges that the slavery conversation can be an uncomfortable one, particularly among southerners, having that conversation over a good meal can ease that tension. And everybody has some kind of food tradition in their family.

And to talk about what that tradition or culture was among the lives of African-Americans is a way for us to try to understand the lives of enslaved people in a more holistic way," she says. In various instances, slaves boiled greens that were traditional to some Native American cuisines, such as marsh marigold and milkweed. Since slaves received such poor cuts of meat, their rations were often more ideal for flavoring foods, rather than serving as a meal itself. Many archaeological excavations at slave quarters turn up small, fragmented animal bones, which suggest that slaves often used their small meat rations in soups or stews.

Cornbread, still a popular accompaniment to greens today, was often used to soak up this juice. Chilluns et cornbread soaked in de pot liquor what de greens or peas done been biled in. Slaves never got much meat. Enslaved cooks who were in charge of preparing meals for the entire community constantly struggled with cooking for so many people with limited ingredients, materials and time.

Greens were an ideal food since they could be cooked with little attention, in a single pot. Carol Graham, a former slave from Alabama, noted this challenge:. Today, we like to enjoy sweet potatoes with lots of extra sweetness. We drizzle them with butter, sugar, cinnamon, toasted marshmallows or just go ahead and turn them into pie form. The sweet potato, however, was originally favored as a simple, more wholesome vegetable.

Sweet potatoes are hearty vegetables that grow well in less ideal soil, which made them an ideal crop for enslaved people and lower class whites. Anthony Taylor, who was enslaved as a young child in Arkansas, remembers learning how to grow potatoes on the plantation after freedom and he continued to raise sweet potatoes in his older age.

That is how I come to raise such big potatoes. I been raising them fifty years. There are hill potatoes. Like corn, the prevalence of sweet potatoes in Southern food is a marriage of African and Native American practices. The sweet potato is native to the Americas and was a familiar staple to many Native American nations. Posing a strikingly similar resemblance to the yams of West Africa, enslaved people could apply their traditions and techniques previously reserved for yams to the sweet potato with relative ease.

Slaves could roast potatoes in hot ashes while wrapped in leaves, like they would with cornbread or ash-cake, or cook them over the fire with other foods. Nellie Smith, a former slave from Georgia, remembered her grandmother would bake potatoes alongside a roast. The South knows how to do vegetables right. If they are not flavored with meat or animal fat see greens above , they are often fried.

One vegetable that is particularly favored as a fried delicacy in the South is okra. Native to Ethopia, okra is one of the many food staples that traversed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas and is one of the most prominent food associated with the influence of African culture on the New World.

In West Africa, okra was often used as a thickening agent for soups and one-pot meals and many slaves grew okra in their gardens. In the popular cookbook The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph , two stews appear that used okra, including the now-familiar and much loved dish called gumbo. The two recipes are as follows:.

Take an equal quantity of each, let the ochra be young, slice it, and skin the tomatos; put them into a pan without water, add a lump of butter, an onion chopped fine, some pepper and salt, and stew them one hour. Gumbo—A West India Dish. Gather young pods of ochra, wash them clean, and put them in a pan with a little water, salt and pepper, stew them till tender, and serve them with melted butter.

They are very nutritious, and easy of digestion. Our culinary traditions will continue to draw inspiration from generation to generation and take on new forms. Sociologist William C. While gumbo, the flagship dish of New Orleans, is usually thickened with okra, the technique is actually an adaptation of soupikandia, a Senegalese soupy stew slave cooks prepared in plantation kitchens for both themselves and their owners.

Her own mission is to make sure that the contribution of slaves to America's culinary traditions isn't forgotten. The primary challenge, Harris says, is reconstructing history when one group of people—in this case, white slave owners—did their best to subjugate Africans to the point where they were nearly left out entirely.

David Shields , a professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and an expert in early American literature and food revivals, points to Emeline Jones as an example. Jones was a slave who started as a house servant and rose to the pinnacle of American culinary life with her extravagant multicourse meals. She earned admiration—and job offers—from Presidents Garfield, Arthur, and Cleveland, who sampled her fabulous meals of terrapin and canvasback duck, Lynnhaven oysters and crab salad, hominy cakes and fabulous confections, prepared when Jones worked as a cook at New York clubs in the late s.

Her story might have been lost if Shields had not dug through news articles and obituaries to re-create her life. Researcher Alicia Cromwell says one major challenge is "studying the silences," a phrase coined by Harris, which forces researchers to engage in detective-style deductions to piece together a more complete view of history in the absence of primary documents like diaries and letters written by slaves.

When working on her master's thesis, Cromwell buried herself in documents—legislative records, tax rolls, newspaper clippings, and primary sources other scholars had reviewed hundreds, if not thousands of times before—and was able to discern that female Muslim Nigerian slaves, working as fruit sellers and market vendors on behalf of their owners, helped shape the overall economic structure of the American South with long-distance price fixing and aggressive sales techniques.

Georgia chef and farmer Matthew Raiford is able to reconstruct his family's past through his farm, which has been in his family since He came to the North Carolina conference with a yellowed letter, a rare piece of history addressed from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, detailing how and where to plant corn, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and watermelon. His great-great-great grandfather Jupiter Gilliard, the man who purchased the farm, was born a slave in Bailey, back on Sapelo, agrees.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Alicia Cromwell is a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina. She is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia. All rights reserved.

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