more, the chicken was so familiar to many Africans, who raised the birds in open yards (a practice common through much of the South), that enslaved women eventually displaced white women as Virginia’s main chicken vendors. A pot of bacon and greens would be prepared more or less identically to the meat-flavored vegetable relishes of Western Africa, though with new ingredients substituted—salt pork, for instance, replacing the dried shrimp common in some African regions. Twain’s “early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, served hot,” also used one of the region’s most common cooking techniques. Corn pone could be substituted for simmered sorghum or millet—or might not represent a substitution at all, since maize was well known in regions like the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). And chitlins were deeply associated with slave cooking, especially after the late eighteenth century, when planters increasingly offered poor cuts instead of whole animals to be divided.
The slaves on the Quarles place might have cooked very differently than did those in other states or regions. They probably didn’t make hoppin’ John, the Carolina classic of cowpeas and rice simmered with a seasoning bone of smoked ham, possibly brought from the West Indies as pois pigeon (say it out loud). They wouldn’t have made gumbo like that cooked by black and white Louisianans ( gombo was the Bantu word for the okra stewing with chicken and shrimp and spices and ground sassafras leaves). They couldn’t have cooked diamondback terrapins, like the ones roasted in the shell by slaves living close to brackish coastal marshes. They probably didn’t have Guinea hens, the African fowl still found near old Virginia and Maryland plantations, or cook much with peanuts, calling them “goobers” in a corruption of the Kongo word nguba.
Still, many of their meals came from the same deep, African-American culinary grammar as these dishes, and that later inspired the free black cooks of Virginia’s Freetown (Edna Lewis’s evocation of Freetown in The Taste of Country Cooking is one of the most flatly gorgeous, inspiring visions ever written about what American food can be). Dipping a wooden spoon into a pot of savory greens, stirring up the bits of bacon and fatback, smelling to judge the “pot likker”; 3 whether cooking for themselves or for the Quarleses, the slave cooks helped to define a place over which they seemed to have little control, shaping it with their sensibilities and desires and tastes. For both blacks and whites—and certainly for Twain—their skills helped to make the South the South.
In Was Huck Black? Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes what is, to me, a completely convincing argument that Huck’s talk owed more to Southern black dialects than to the white, “backwoods Missouri” speech Twain mentions in the introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Food is much less important to the novel than is speech; still, Twain uses it both to mark Huck’s class and to give him a cultural bond with Jim, though it’s a bond that Huck only gradually recognizes.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck had told Tom about a slave named Uncle Jake, ending with, “Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him. But you needn’t tell that. A body’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as a steady thing.” Still, the foods Huck loves best are also those of the slaves. His own eponymous novel opens with him pining for a “barrel of odds and ends” in which “the things get mixed up, and the juice kinds of swaps around, and the things go better,” a cooking style that sounds a lot like the single-pot stews preferred by slaves throughout the South (the low-fired clay colonoware pots made by some slaves were most appropriate for a slow simmer). By the book’s midpoint, his reluctance to eat with a black man is completely gone. When Huck returns to the raft after escaping the stunning, casual bloodlust of
The slaves on the Quarles place might have cooked very differently than did those in other states or regions. They probably didn’t make hoppin’ John, the Carolina classic of cowpeas and rice simmered with a seasoning bone of smoked ham, possibly brought from the West Indies as pois pigeon (say it out loud). They wouldn’t have made gumbo like that cooked by black and white Louisianans ( gombo was the Bantu word for the okra stewing with chicken and shrimp and spices and ground sassafras leaves). They couldn’t have cooked diamondback terrapins, like the ones roasted in the shell by slaves living close to brackish coastal marshes. They probably didn’t have Guinea hens, the African fowl still found near old Virginia and Maryland plantations, or cook much with peanuts, calling them “goobers” in a corruption of the Kongo word nguba.
Still, many of their meals came from the same deep, African-American culinary grammar as these dishes, and that later inspired the free black cooks of Virginia’s Freetown (Edna Lewis’s evocation of Freetown in The Taste of Country Cooking is one of the most flatly gorgeous, inspiring visions ever written about what American food can be). Dipping a wooden spoon into a pot of savory greens, stirring up the bits of bacon and fatback, smelling to judge the “pot likker”; 3 whether cooking for themselves or for the Quarleses, the slave cooks helped to define a place over which they seemed to have little control, shaping it with their sensibilities and desires and tastes. For both blacks and whites—and certainly for Twain—their skills helped to make the South the South.
In Was Huck Black? Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes what is, to me, a completely convincing argument that Huck’s talk owed more to Southern black dialects than to the white, “backwoods Missouri” speech Twain mentions in the introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Food is much less important to the novel than is speech; still, Twain uses it both to mark Huck’s class and to give him a cultural bond with Jim, though it’s a bond that Huck only gradually recognizes.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck had told Tom about a slave named Uncle Jake, ending with, “Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him. But you needn’t tell that. A body’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as a steady thing.” Still, the foods Huck loves best are also those of the slaves. His own eponymous novel opens with him pining for a “barrel of odds and ends” in which “the things get mixed up, and the juice kinds of swaps around, and the things go better,” a cooking style that sounds a lot like the single-pot stews preferred by slaves throughout the South (the low-fired clay colonoware pots made by some slaves were most appropriate for a slow simmer). By the book’s midpoint, his reluctance to eat with a black man is completely gone. When Huck returns to the raft after escaping the stunning, casual bloodlust of
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