For more information, feel free to contact Michael Twitty by clicking here.
For questions about the website or its contents, please contact Michael Nocerino by clicking here.
Copyright 2007 AfroFoodways.com All rights reserved.
Recent Articles
May 9, 2007: Where Settlers, Slaves and Natives Converged, a Way of Eating Was Born
Mar 30, 2007: Historical food cooking at Smithfield
Mar 28, 2007: Historian Traces Slave Life to Frederick
Feb 4, 2007: Living A Slave's Life
Jun 22, 2005: Living History Farm Lends Insight to Plantation Life
Where Settlers, Slaves and Natives Converged, a Way of Eating Was Born
By Geneva Collins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007; F01
A hundred-plus Englishmen debark from three ships and set up housekeeping on the swampy shores of the James River. This year's 400th anniversary celebrations honor that event as the beginning of this nation, but let's also hail it as the start of Southern cuisine.
It's true the Spanish hit America's shores first, bringing pork to the New World and disseminating corn to other parts of the globe, but what we think of as quintessential Southern cooking -- country ham, hominy grits, black-eyed peas -- has its roots in the convergence of English, Native American and African American cultures in Jamestown beginning in the first half of the 17th century.
Those English settlers were ill-prepared, according to Randy Shifflett, a history professor at Virginia Tech: "The Virginia Company . . . told them it was a land of milk and honey, with naked savages wanting to trade for trash. They found instead that the locals were wary and didn't react kindly to exploitative negotiations."
Many of the provisions they had sailed with were either depleted or spoiled by seawater during the six-month crossing, Shifflett says. The men weren't particularly skilled at hunting and fishing -- leisure activities for landed gentry back in England -- or at farming, either. Perhaps if they had brought women (who didn't arrive in large numbers until 1619) they would have planted more kitchen gardens. Instead, they insisted on growing tobacco, a lucrative cash crop but not much use when food was scarce, which was just about all the time during those first years.
The New World offered the settlers such culinary riches as corn, squash and beans, often referred to as the three sisters. Before relations turned sour, the Native Americans showed them how to make corn pone and how to hull and soak corn kernels with lye from ashes to make hominy and then pound it into grits.
Archaeological evidence shows the settlers also ate a lot of squirrel, which was easier to obtain than deer or other larger animals without straying too far from the fort and risking an encounter with unfriendly Indians, Shifflett says.
Among Southerners, "there's all this controversy over who invented Brunswick stew" -- a dish traditionally incorporating squirrel and arguably named for Brunswick County, Va. -- says culinary historian Cindy Bertelsen, co-chairman of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends, which oversees the collection of historic cookbooks at Virginia Tech. "But it's probably just what everybody ate back then: a stew with root vegetables, corn, beans and a little meat."
The waters offered up prodigious amounts of sturgeon, shad, oysters and turtles. According to one account of a dire period in 1609, the colonists subsisted on nothing but oysters for nine weeks -- some today might not consider that dire -- save for "a pint of Indian corn to each man of a week." Capt. John Smith, the colony's intrepid leader (and a man who might have stretched the truth some), writes of once being stung by a stingray while fishing in the Rappahannock River. He became so ill that the fishing party planned his funeral. He not only recovered but ate the dastardly stingray for supper.
The English had brought with them pork and cattle, both new to the Powhatan Indians. Some hogs escaped from the fort, soon turned feral and flourished in the woods, laying the groundwork for the Virginia ham industry.
The first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, originally from what is now Angola. Their immeasurable contributions to Southern cuisine include okra, black-eyed peas and peanuts (the last brought to Africa from Peru by the Portuguese). Stops in the Caribbean brought hot pepper and other spices.
"Virginia peanut soup as we know it is a direct descendant of maafe," a peanut soup eaten by the Wolof people of Senegal and Gambia, says Michael Twitty, a descendant of enslaved colonial Virginians and a culinary historian who specializes in African American foodways.
The Jamestown settlers, slaves and Native Americans of the 1600s "all had what I call a common edible vocabulary," he adds. All three groups were used to eating mushes of some type: corn mush for the Indians, oatmeal for the English, millet porridge for the Africans. Ditto griddle breads cooked on cast iron in embers and called hoecakes or ash cakes.
"What the Africans had to go through to survive gave them an incredible instinct for flavor," says Twitty, who disputes the concept that the slaves ate only "what was thrown to them." They had kitchen gardens and were allowed to hunt and fish, he says. They sold their produce to their owners and at markets and used the money to buy their freedom.
Several historians credit slaves with adding greens and other vegetables to plantation owners' meat- and-starch-centric diets.
"There have been some studies done on the slave diet [that have shown] they may have been healthier than their white counterparts," says Nancy Carter Crump, author of "Hearthside Cooking: An Introduction to Virginia Plantation Cuisine" (Howell Press, 1986). "Meat and starches were heavier on plantation dinner tables, but slaves were eating more vegetables."
But Southern cooking is about more than components.
"It wasn't just ingredients, but style, that the English contributed to the culture," notes Barbara Haber, author of "From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals" (Free Press, 2002) and a former curator of the voluminous cookbook collection at the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. "The famously hospitable Virginia style" developed once supply ships started coming to the colony regularly, she says. The concept of who ate when, the order of the meal and the setting of the table would have been based on British customs.
The boats "would bring china and all these other amenities. Planters' dining rooms in early Virginia were very fancy, with many courses served," as households vied to replicate the ways of back home, she says.
Southern hospitality is British in origin? No wonder they never forgave us for inventing iced tea.
Historical food cooking at Smithfield
A slave cooking expert will share some recipes and knowledge today and Saturday.
By Tonia Moxley
The Roanoke Times
Wednesday, March 30, 2007
BLACKSBURG -- Growing up, Michael Twitty couldn't understand why his grandparents grew tobacco and cotton on little plots in the city. Or why "people can remember the name of a watermelon they grew but can't remember the names of their first cousins."
Today he knows: "The experience of hand to earth to mouth is something you never forget. It's in our DNA."
But this curiosity still drives him as he works to trace his forebears, who were marched in slave coffles from the port of Richmond over the Blue Ridge Mountains and sold to plantation owners in Virginia, Alabama and South Carolina.
Slaves from those ships likely also ended up in present-day Blacksburg at Smithfield, as well as other Montgomery County plantations. Twitty has spent his career as a food historian tracking those ancestors through the foodways they brought with them, and their contributions to American cuisine.
"I always wanted to be as close as possible to my ancestors because they were calling me. They are still calling me," said Twitty, director of interpretation at Maryland's Menare Foundation. "A lot of people unfortunately ignore the voice of the past. I'm trying to heed it."
He'll share that journey today at a free talk at the Blacksburg library, and another at Virginia Tech. Twitty will also spend Saturday doing cooking demonstrations and talks for visitors to Historic Smithfield when it opens for the 2007 season. This year's opening day celebration focuses on Colonial food techniques, culture and history -- especially those of slaves. It is part of a push to expand the living history museum's black history offerings.
Enslaved people made this plantation what it was, Smithfield Director Terry Nicholson said. Grant-funded research conducted a few years ago by Duke University professor Phillip Troutman unearthed some lost stories and names of slaves who lived there, including what is thought to be the household's head chef, Sukey.
Sukey's purview might have been the manor house's basement kitchen where she would have tended stew pots in the hearth crowned with a 200-year-old chestnut beam harvested from the grounds.
Visitors can tour the house Saturday and see a display of the names of generations of slaves who lived and worked at Smithfield.
As for the food, Southern staples such as chitlins were not new to Africans brought in chains to Virginia in the 1700s, Twitty said. Okra was brought to America from Africa.
The fried black-eyed pea cakes favored by Mary Randolph of Richmond, author of arguably the most influential cookbook in American history, "The Virginia Housewife," published in 1824, may have originated in present-day Nigeria. Twitty also emphasizes the contributions of Africans and African Americans to American horticulture, particularly the heirloom vegetables slaves and freed blacks cultivated in their own gardens. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson bought vegetables for his table from enslaved gardeners, Twitty said.
At home in Rockville, Md., Twitty cultivates those heirloom seeds, plantings from which will be included in the African American Heritage Garden at this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.
Some of Twitty's research into African and American slavery history has proved ground breaking to food and horticulture historians, according to Wesley Greene, garden historian at Colonial Williamsburg.
Twitty has written four manuscripts on slavery and food in Virginia and Maryland, and self-published one that's available through his Web site.
He also works as a slave-life researcher at the Menare Foundation in Germantown, Md., which researches and teaches the history of the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses that helped free Southern slaves before the Civil War.
Twitty's visit is partially sponsored by the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Committee, which oversees a collection of historic Virginia cookbooks at Virginia Tech's Newman Library.
He'll be back in Blacksburg in April for a weekend-long culinary history symposium "From Jamestown to the Blue Ridge," organized by the committee.
On the Net: www.menare.org, www.smithfieldplantation.org
Historian Traces Slave Life to Frederick
By Gail Bradshaw
Frederick News-Post
March 28, 2007
Okra soup bubbling in an open hearth Dutch oven, sitting on glowing embers, was only one of the delicious treats experienced by those in attendance at Rose Hill Manor on Saturday, March 24.
Michael W. Twitty, culinary historian and interpretive educator, presented “Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders 1634-1864” to an enthusiastic audience. He spoke about and demonstrated the preparation of foods that came to Maryland from Africa, as well as foods that are native to America, or that were brought here from other countries, especially Germany and the Caribbean.
According to Twitty’s research, “Frederick County is unique — it was a cultural hinge between the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont and the Upper South. Frederick is where the North began to fade and the South began — to put it a better way, it was a little south of the Mason-Dixon line and a little north of Dixie ... It was heavily German, and Scots Irish and English, with lingering influences from Susquehannock people who invaded the regions in the centuries before the English arrived. It was in that cultural mix that enslaved Africans from Upper West Africa would come to create a culture.”
Twitty used one of the many recipes for okra soup that has been handed down over the last 300 years in the Maryland area. “It is the African American in Frederick’s gumbo.”
Okra is a vegetable that originated in Africa and was brought to America by slaves who were brought here to work. It has been grown here in Maryland since before the 1740s. In addition to soup, okra can be used with other vegetables or greens.
Greens of all kinds were important to the slave diet. As they weeded the fields of crops for their owners, any edible weeds they found were put in their pockets or clothing and saved to be eaten at the evening meal or later. Pokeweed (young leaves only, as it is poisonous), lamb’s quarters, watercress, and mustard greens were among what we call weeds that were consumed by slaves and others. Greens were usually fried with bacon or boiled.
Slaves were brought to Maryland often because of the work skills that they had learned in their African countries as free men and women. They knew about tobacco, grains, fishing, herding and horses. Women from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea were preferred for kitchen and in-home jobs in America.
Slaves brought hot peppers, black-eyed peas, cowpeas, muskmelons and watermelon. They brought guinea hogs and guinea fowl, too.
Living A Slave's Life
Underground Railroad Immersion participants learn what it means to lose their freedom
By Jonathan Pitts
Baltimore Sun
February 4, 2007
You look over at the other slaves in the field - Rebecca, Charles, Anne and the rest - and you see it's bigger than theirs. You hope the slave driver comes by and takes notice. It might get you a little more to eat tonight, maybe a blanket to keep the cold away.
Not that you like Red Sam, the overseer who's watching you.
You decided a few months back to become a "slave" for a day, to be a part of the first Underground Railroad Immersion Experience in Montgomery County.
You knew they were going to blindfold you and the others, march you into the woods someplace, and put you to work the way slaves worked on Maryland plantations in the 1850s, when slavery was still legal in this country.
You knew that Anthony Cohen, the historian and project organizer, and his staff would transport you to a period of history they see as key to our nation's character.
You wanted to learn about freedom by seeing what it was like to live without it. But you really weren't prepared for Red Sam.
There he is now, in his big straw hat. Big as a barn, looking down on you from the top of that hill like some king with his crown. Carrying that walking stick like it was the staff of Moses. A black man, lording it over the slaves, telling them what to do!
He's the one who told you to pull up this sedge today but never said how.
You did it wrong, and he came over and prodded you with his cane. He said he had a warm cabin and soft bed near the plantation missus' house. He has it comfortable, and if you messed that up, he'd mess you up.
Black, white or in-between, on the plantation, everybody looks out for what's his. Your fingers are getting blisters, you're starting to feel the cold, and you sure hope Red Sam comes by to check your pile.
Captured by history
For Tony Cohen, the best way to know the past is to live it. One time, when a professor asked him to write on a period of history that had gone unrecorded, he picked the Underground Railroad.
He looked through enough old newspapers, slave narratives and court papers to write his first book: The Underground Railroad in Montgomery County: A History and Driving Guide (Montgomery County Historical Society). Later, he walked from Maryland to Canada, 800 miles, following old escape routes and sleeping in the old safe houses to get a sense of what it felt like.
He did something else unusual. He mailed himself to New York in a wooden crate. That's just what a runaway slave he'd read about, Henry "Box" Brown, did 150 years or so earlier.
It got so hot in the box, Cohen says, he had to cut his pants legs off with a pocketknife. When he finally got out and filled his lungs with that warm, smoggy city air, it was the sweetest air he'd ever tasted.
He got famous, too. If he hadn't, we wouldn't be at the slave immersion today. Smithsonian magazine wrote about his walk north. Web sites tracked his progress. NBC did broadcasts.
Finally, Oprah Winfrey heard about Cohen. She put him on her show in 1996. She said she needed his help. She had bought the movie rights to the Toni Morrison novel, Beloved, and was about to play the part of a runaway slave for the film.
She had read a lot about slavery, but she didn't know what the life was really like. She asked Cohen to show her.
At first, he was flummoxed. On his walk north, he visited sites more than a century old; he hadn't exactly lived as a runaway slave lived. But he and some friends pooled their knowledge of slave narratives and oral histories and designed a version of what Winfrey wanted.
Continued...
Living History Farm Lends Insight to Plantation Life
By Kiah Culver
The Gazette
June 22, 2005
Project organizer Tony Cohen said it is his goal to have the farm serve as a "laboratory to explore 19th century slave and plantation life in Montgomery County."
While not officially named, the living history center at the Button Farm is up and running. It was a plantation farm, and until recent years, was the site of a working crop farm at 16820 Black Rock Road. Cohen, an historian of American slavery and founder of the Menare Foundation -- which uses the history of the Underground Railroad to promote community revitalization and development -- has been working on the Button Farm project for a couple of years. He is close to securing a 50-year lease on the site from the state, he said.
Cohen said there is still a lot of work to be done on the project, but already there are some informal school and summer camp programs making use of the history center.
An open house was held Saturday to invite the community at-large to visit the farm and develop an understanding of the work being done.
The program is designed to provide an interactive experience and afford its visitors the opportunity to delve in to the roots of the history of slavery -- literally.
"When kids get off the bus they'll have hoes in their hands," Cohen said.
Patrons will be involved in activities such as planting crops and picking cotton with the elementary tools of the day to gain an accurate appreciation for the hardships of being a slave, and to deepen their appreciation for their own history, he explained.
Re-enactors enhanced the experience Saturday, as did a blacksmith who, with his hammers, strenuously pounded on shapeless metal over a fire to draw out a decorative candleholder.
In his work with the Menare Foundation, Cohen seeks out "stations" on the Underground Railroad throughout the country and restores and preserves the landmarks.
The term "menare" is a Latin word meaning to lead or to follow. Cohen was inspired to create the foundation after his 1996 "Walk to Canada," an 800-mile exploration of the Underground Railroad from Maryland to Canada.
Cohen also made an appearance the same year on the Oprah Winfrey show and assisted the talk show host in preparating for her role in the film "Beloved."
Cohen, who currently resides in Olney will be moving to the Germantown farm later this summer when a farm manager is due to arrive. He said he hopes to extend the living history center project to train at-risk youths in the community and teach them skills that can be applied in the workforce.
"Many kids do not have a taste of history and we want them to understand where they come from," said Michael Twitty, program director. Twitty oversees the Common Grounds Garden on the farm, which is currently filled with herbs and vegetables including sweet potatoes and tobacco.
One site along the tour of the farm that awakened memories of her ancestors in Barbara Talley was the slave cemetery, which could easily be overlooked with the overgrown grass covering unmarked headstones and footstones.
Talley is a member of Bahai, a faith organization that awards people in the community who use their work for humanitarian efforts and came out in support of Cohen's work.
Grants have provided some funding for the project, but Cohen said donations are a big part of the center's operation.
He hopes to add a workshop for artisans, a log cabin, a retreat center and accommodations for overnight groups on the site.
"Many people look at the past with resentment of what happened to slaves, but instead of hating history, the key is growing through it," Talley said.
Cohen expects to hold an official opening of the living history center later this summer. For more information about the project, contact the Menare Foundation at 301-601-8700.