"We need to forget this so we can heal," an older white woman said at the end of my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their impact on American cooking Influence. Something I said, or every word I said, made her uneasy.
My talk covered 300 years of American history, beginning with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans and still echoing in our culture today, from the myth of the "happy servant" (think syrup bottle Aunt Jemima) to broader marketing of black slavery (such as TV commercials for Caribbean resorts targeting white American tourists). I spoke to an audience of 30 people at the Meir Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I didn't anticipate the woman's displeasure, trying to forget is not an unsettling reaction to an unsettling story about the complex roots of our history, especially some of our favorite foods.
are the stories of people like George Washington’s chef Hercules and Emmanuel Jones, who used their skills to rise from slavery to a successful career in cooking in the food industry and avoid oppressive appearances* **Enjoy. *This is also the story of countless unknown chefs across the South, the details of whose existence are now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It is a double-edged sword, full of pain and pride. Calculating it can be cumbersome, but it's also necessary. The story of the enslaved cook teaches us that we can love our country or criticize it and find some peace on the road.
It is not easy to unravel the history of enslaved cooks, who left few records of themselves, and whose stories often appear in the historical record as insinuating details scattered among those who imprisoned them in the story. In my recent research on enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms they once lived in, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged, the gardens they cultivated, and slave owners’ letters, recipes, and plantation records Waiting for documents – to learn about their experiences. These remnants, although few, clearly demonstrate that enslaved cooks played a central role in the birth of our nation's cultural heritage.
In the early 17th century, tobacco cultivation began to spread in Virginia's tidewater region. Soon, colonists established plantations such as Shirley Plantation, founded around 1613; Berkeley 100 and Bloomingdale's 100, whose 1,000 acres of land stretched along the James River. These large houses marked a transitional period in which British cultural norms dominated the Virginia landscape.
Traditions surrounding meals and maintaining a large family were part of these norms, and white gentlemen began to seek domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on the plantations were indentured servants who worked without pay for a contracted period of time before eventually being freed. But by the end of the 17th century, plantations throughout Virginia were being turned into slave laborers, who were captured from central and west Africa to grow crops and build buildings, generally for white families. Soon these enslaved cooks were filling roles once occupied by white indentured servants.
Black chefs are on fire 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, slept above the fireplace in the winter, and outside in the summer. Rising before dawn each day, they baked bread for the morning, cooked soup for the afternoon, and created a sacred feast for the evening. They grilled meats, made jelly, made puddings, made desserts, and prepared several meals a day for white families. They also had to feed every free man who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, a bell would ring, allowing enslaved cooks to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been a delight, taken from a minstrel song
when newly free African Americans fled plantations in search of housekeepers, butlers, cooks, chauffeurs, Pullman porters, and When waitresses worked, the only jobs they could get were Aunt Jemima and Rastus serving white people with a smile, which reinforced the myth that black cooks were always happy and content, both during slavery and in their current situation. You can see their faces on black Americans throughout the early 20th century, and they still grace grocery store shelves today, albeit modified to reflect a more demure image.
My outraged listeners may have grown up in the old enslaved cook narratives in which these images are rooted, where the cook was loyal, passive, and supposedly happy—a non-threatening person, The ultimate goal is to help a white woman realize her own vision for a family. But as an American, I live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that hold together a complex tradition that is sharply divided along racial lines. It ignores the story of Chef Hercules, or the true story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting the pain of enslaving chefs to soothe ourselves, we erase the pride and achievements of countless exceptional chefs who nourished a nation.
*Editor's Note, August 15, 2018: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Chef Hercules was our nation's first White House chef, when in fact, he served in Vernon Hill and Philadelphia served as George Washington's cook until the White House was built