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

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.

Fish and Foodways in Dutch Brazil, 1640-1649

Moqueca (fish stew), rice, and manioc meal, recipe below

Between 1640 and 1649, the Dutch controlled Portugal’s African settlements and its most important sugar producing region in southern Brazil. Dutchman Johan Nieuhoff worked for the Dutch East Indies and Dutch West Indies Companies spending nine years in Brazil. “The most universal food of the Brazilians,” is manioc or cassava meal, he writes in the 1640s. He adds they also feast upon seasoned crabs and craw-fish either boiled or roasted. “Small fish” they wrap and cook in banana leaves. Here are two Brazilian fish recipes that’s reminiscent of Niehoff’s account.

Bahian Crab Meat in a shell recipe: http://www.maria-brazil.org/casquinha_de_siri.htm

Moqueca Bahian fish stew recipe: http://events.nytimes.com/recipes/12100/1990/09/26/Moqueca-Bahian-fish-stew/recipe.html

Native American Foodways and Fish

Smoked Fish Soup, recipe below

Here is an early Seventh century description of Native American cookery and fish in the Chesapeake region of the US South that the British captain John smith provides. “Their fish . . . they boyle either very tenderly, or broyle it so long on hurdles over the fire; or else after the Spanish fashion, putting it on a spit, they turn first the one side, then the other, till it be as dire as their jerkin beefe in the west Indies, that they keep it a month or more without putrefying. Here is a Native American fish recipe.

Maple Sugar Smoked Fish recipe: http://www.recipegoldmine.com/worldnativeam/maple-sugar-smoked-fish.html