Back to School Foodways Series: Part 4 Atlanta University Center Schools

Catfish sandwich and fries

An educational consortium called the Atlanta University Center (AUC), located in Southwest Atlanta, was one of the city’s African-American communities. AUC schools, located across from the Georgia Dome, included the Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), Morris Brown College, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. In the neighborhood surrounding the AUC complex there were notable black eateries like Pascal’s, and more humble holes-in-the-wall in which black students sought refuge from their respective college cafeteria menus. In the 1950s and 1960s, AUC students “were trying to go some place and get good food off campus. Because the food was just institutional,” says Stanlie M. James who attended Spelman in the late 1960s. It was not like today where college cafeterias are operated like a food court with salad bars, pasta bars, and lots of options. James, originally from Iowa, goes on to say, when she was a student at Spelman, “if they were having liver and onions, then that’s what they were having.” So those who could at neighborhood cafés, cafeterias, restaurants, or mom and pop joints that sold carry out items like fried fish sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, and barbecue sandwiches. What are some of the names and locations of your favorite off campus high school and college eateries and descriptions of the menu items that you loved?

Back to School Foodways Series: Part 2 Virginia State

Lamenta Crouch recalls, there was a lot of “starchy foods including potatoes served with just about every meal and lots of pasta,” in the Virginia State cafeteria in the late 1960s.

At Virginia State (Virginia State University Today (VSU)) students ate what they called “wonder meat” because “we wondered what it was,” says Lamenta Diane Watkins Crouch, a 1970 Virginia state graduate. Her older sister Francis Ann Watkins Neely graduated from Virginia Union in 1967. “I really did not like the lamb chops,” that they served in the cafeteria. “My husband went to Howard University and he told me that the meat that they served in the student cafeteria there he believed [were poor quality cuts that] came from the Federal government.” In general “we southerners just did not like the lunch and dinner menus in the college cafeteria,” says Watkins Neely. The food at Virginia State, according to her younger sister Lamenta Watkins Crouch, “was not seasoned the same as home,” and there was a lot of “starchy foods including potatoes served with just about every meal and lots of pasta.” “My mother was a really good cook and that what I grew up on” says Watkins Neelly. “We southern students were always receiving care packages from home filled with good food. So we always knew somebody on campus who had just received a care packages so we would go and eat that instead of the cafeteria food.” In contrast she said that the northern students who had fewer options seemed to say very little about the cafeteria food at Union than the southerners. Here are some interesting links to how students are eating at VSU today:

Today’s VSU menu:

Brunch Menu
Chicken Tenders

Whipped Potatoes
Mixed Vegetables

Soup – Beef Noodle

Grill
Breaded Fish Filet
Shoe String French Fries

Dinner Menu
Honey Hoisin Pork Chop
Balanced Choice – Pasta with Meat Sauce

Florentine Rice
California Blend Vegetables
Green Beans

Link to VSU “Love From Home Baskets”: http://www.vsu.edu/pages/4196.asp

Back to School Foodways Series: Part 1 Alabama State

Fried chicken recipes below

Freshmen Orientation at Babson College yesterday, my new academic home, signaled the start of new academic year. It’s also a special year for our family because my daughter Chase Asabe Opie is entering kindergarten and she’s very excited! I’m going to do some post on foodways and schools to celebrate the start of new academic year for students, teachers, and parents. Before he moved to Atlanta and became one of MLK’s deputies in the civil rights movement, Ralph David Abernathy led a student strike to protest food inequalities between faculty and students in the cafeteria of Alabama State College (Now Alabama State University (ASU) ). Abernathy enrolled in Alabama State in the late 1940s on the GI Bill after receiving an honorable discharge from the Army. Reflecting on the cafeteria food at Alabama State, he remembers the students eating “heaps of steaming pork and beans—and nothing more, not even a piece of bread to sop it up,” for lunch. Dinner was not much different. He writes that the best dinner they ever had was Spam with unbuttered grits, while the faculty feasted on huge pieces of real country ham. “After several weeks of this fare, we were sick to death of it and were dreaming every night of fried chicken and biscuits.” Abernathy was elected student body president in his sophomore year. Right away he organized a complete student boycott of the cafeteria and it did not take long for the school’s administration to act: the next time the cafeteria opened at Alabama State, students “saw huge platters of fried chicken waiting at the counter.” Here a link to an ASU omenu so you can see how the food there has changed since the 1940s http://www.alasu.edu/current-students/dining/online-menus/index.aspx. Here’s a fried chicken recipe for college student living off campus without a meal card for the first time, that was my deal back in 1981.

Butter milk based fried chicken video recipe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxEhH6MPH28

Traditional fried chicken recipe: http://www.thegutsygourmet.net/fryed-chix.html

Vegan fried chicken recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=7534.0