Enslaved Wedding Reception Food in the Antebellum South

Fried okra, recipe below

I am the midst of a series on Weddings and food within Africa and African Diaspora from an historical prospective. Yesterday I talked about wedding receptions that enslaved folk held today let’s turn to those receptions that the master class hosted and bad for which happened less frequently. For why would a master fork out the money for wedding and reception that southern laws at least did not recognize? Some scholars argue masters expected gratitude, loyalty, and hard work thereafter. Others maintain perverted Christian masters thought slavery fine but marriages outside the Christian church sinful. A third interpretation is white masters supported enslaved marriages and paid for reception food because the marriage would hopefully produce children—additional property—who they would sell or exploit as laborers. I just picked up some okra and my children on my case to coke sooner rather than later. Fried okra is a favorite summer side dish that I imagine might appear on the buffet table at antebellum wedding. Here’s a southern fried okra recipe: http://www.olsouthrecipes.com/okra.html

Dancing, Drinking, and Eating Pie: Pinkster Festivals in Seventeenth Century New York City

Apple pie, recipe below

Yesterday I started talking about the Pinkster festival first celebrated in metropolitan Dutch New York and New Jersey in the early 1600s. As enslaved Africans moved to the center of the Pinkster festival, they Africanized it electing a Pinkster King and also staged it in urban forums such as New York City food markets. Large numbers of enslaved Africans gathered with the permission of their masters to attend church services and baptisms away from home for several days. These events also included Dutch and Native Americans spectators enjoying blacks playing fiddles, banjos, conga drums, and dancing jigs, breakdowns, double shuffles, and as well as “Guinea dances which some scholars theorize were precursors to contemporary hip hop dance moves. Africans also sold food to raise travel cost—foraged foods like berries, herbs, vegetables, beers, fish, oysters, hogs—and they sold food at the event—ginger bread, beer and pies. Here is a delicious apple pie recipe that you can make with alone or with children from the Culinary Institute of America located in the Hudson Valley.

Apple pie recipe: http://www.ciakids.com/forkids/kitchen/ny/apple_pie.html

Rent Parties and Fried Fish During the Depression

Fried fish, hush puppies, fries, and tartar sauce, recipes below

To make ends meet during the Depression some African Americans turned to strategies like throwing rent parties. On a Saturday night during the Depression, one could always find buffet-flats, rent parties, whist parties, and dances, where, for a small fee, one could purchase down-home food and dance to good music. Langston Hughes recalled: The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where . . . good fried fish or steaming chitterling were sold at very low prices. This is the last post in a series I been doing on fish, I’d love to get some feedback on the stories and recipes and please share your own fish stories and or recipes from your own families. Here is a recipe for southern fried fish and hush puppies


Fried fish and hush puppy recipe: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=346878

Sweetness and Fish: Women in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro

Spicy grilled Halibut, sauteed asparagus, and candied yams. Halibut recipe below

Brazilians gorged on “sweetmeats of every description, from the most delicate preserves and candies to the coarsest preparations of treacle” writes Maria Graham who traveled to, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the 1820s. Sugar masters made treacle or golden syrup from the drippings accumulated from the vats used in sugar refining. It looked and tasted something like molasses and sold very well when one added chopped coconuts, nuts, and fruit, and let it harden. Plantation mistresses supervised the daily production of treacle candies and other marketable foods and their female slaves received a percentage of their earnings for what they sold on busy city streets. Most of their earnings went toward purchasing their freedom or the freedom of a loved one. Thus ironically sugar played a part in their captivity in Africa and manumission in the Americas. Treacle is also used in recipes. Here’s a forty minute recipe for spicy grilled Halibut with treacle that feeds four people:

Spicy Grilled Halibut

Ingredients
6 Chillies, deseeded and chopped
1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 Onion, sliced
4 Garlic Cloves, chopped
2fl.oz. Black Treacle or Dark Molasses
2 tbsp Honey
8fl.oz. Water

Sea Salt
1 tbsp freshly chopped cilantro
4 Halibut Fillets or Steaks

Method

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan until hot then add the onions and garlic and sauté until soft, stirring from time to time. Add the chilies and continue to sauté for a further 2-3 minutes, stirring. Add the treacle, honey, water, salt and coriander, mix well and simmer for 10 minutes. Allow the mixture to cool a little, then transfer to a food processor and process until smooth. Set aside to cool. Preheat the grill to hot. Dip the halibut in the cooled sauce and grill for about 3 minutes per side depending on the size of the fish, until the fish is cooked through, basting with sauce from time to time. Serve immediately.

Fish as Soul Food in Colonial Lima, Peru

Caigua con Relleno de Pescado (Fish-Stuffed Caigua), recipe below

In 1735, the Spaniard Jorge Juan Antonio De Ulloa, tell us that the city of Lima, Peru consisted of three cast which colonial official tried to keep separate: “whites, or Spaniards, Negroes, Indians, Mestizos [Indian/Spaniard], and other casts, proceeding from the mixture of all three,” he writes. I found this source while doing research for my book Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy. De Ulloa goes on to say, “The Negroes, Mulattoes, and their descendents, form the greater number of the inhabitants.” Now the fish angle, “the negroes and other casts, live tolerably well [on] fish, which is little esteemed by the opulent, selling [it] at a low price,” observed De Ulloa. In short, in eighteenth century Lima, fish was at the center of poor folks soul food dishes—inexpensive great tasting survival food. Here is a recipe from caigua con relleno de pescado (vegetable stuffed fish)

Caigua con Relleno de Pescado (Fish-Stuffed Caigua) recipe

Caigua is a green hollow Peruvian gourd. If you cannot find one here in the states, use another gourd or sweet peppers as a substitute.

Ingredients

Stuffing

8 medium sweet red or green peppers

2 cups water

1 pound fish fillets, such as flounder, red snapper, etc.cut into 1-inch cubes

4 slices of multi-grain bread, crusts removed, and moistened with soy milk (to make 1 cup)

1 egg substitute or egg, beaten

1 medium onion, sliced thin (1/2 cup)

½ teaspoon sea salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

Sauce

1 tablespoon corn oil

¼ cup sliced onion

¼ cup chopped tomato

¼ teaspoon paprika

2 cloves garlic, ground to a paste with 2 tablespoons water

1 cup reserved fish broth

Method

Cut out a 2-inch round from the top of each pepper and remove the core and seeds. Set aside. Make the stuffing: Bring the water to a boil. Add the fish fillets, cover the pan, and simmer over low heat for 10 minutes. Remove the fish and cool. Reserve 1 cup sauce. Pull the cubes apart into threads. In a bowl mix the fish threads with the moistened bread and add the egg, onion, salt, and pepper, mixing well. Make the sauce: Heat the oil in a skillet. Add the onion, tomato, paprika, and garlic paste and stir-fry over low heat for 3 minutes. Add the 1 cup reserved fish broth and bring to a boil. Fill the peppers with the fish stuffing and replace the tops. (Should there be any stuffing left over, shape egg-sized fish balls and set aside.) Place the stuffed peppers in the sauce (with any fish balls from any leftover stuffing). Simmer, covered, over low heat for 15 minutes. Serve hot, with brown or white rice. Serves 8.

Note: O Magazine this month is a special edition on food in which I was interviewed as one of the food specialist, story starts on page 80.