Watch Night Series: Traditions in Guatemala and the Delta

Cranberry sauce, recipes below

I wrote about how In Guatemala City locals set off fire crackers on Christmas. Well they also set them off on New Year's. I found a source that talked about similar traditions in the Mississippi Delta. On New Year’s Day families would eat a traditional dinner including black-eyed peas, rice, and collard greens and shoot out the old year and shoot in the New Year with their guns. “All over you could hear guns going off,” says one Delta native. Then on New Year’s Day folks would eat right at twelve noon insuring a favorable new year. The men might go hunting while the women folk stayed in the kitchen making deserts, candied yams, and homemade cranberry sauce. My mother in law came up from down south for the holidays and she made an incredible homemade cranberry sauce. She insists that cranberry sauce from scratch is easy. Here are recipes you can use for your New Year’s feast. And by the way, in Guatemala City on New Years people shoot off the guns, wear news clothes, and eat a grape each the twelve chimes of the church bell that counts down the coming of the new year all for good luck. The main meal is most likely tamales like it was on Christmas. (See my older post on this http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-foodway-series-christmas_18.html)

Cranberry sauce recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/cranberry_sauce/

Vegan Cranberry sauce recipe: http://www.vegfamily.com/vegan-recipes/sides/cranberry-sauce.htm

Watch Night Series: It's All About the Rice!

Cherry mochi cakes, recipes below

In my first book, Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents, I study the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Europeans, Native Americans, and Asians to create this distinctive cuisine. I drew upon a wide range of sources to examine the ways that food has been a source of community cohesion and cultural identity. For some Asian Americans, New Year’s means preparing sweet rice cakes called mochi. During the early Christian period, Indonesian and Portuguese traders traveling across the Indian Ocean introduced Asian long grain rice from South East Asia to North Africa. North African traders then carried Asian rice across the Sahara to West Africans. Soon after their arrival, West Africans began making extensive use of Asian rice long before the start of the Atlantic slave trade. For low country folks in South Carolina and Georgia, there is no New Year’s celebration without rice based dishes like hoppin’ John (see yesterday's post). Likewise, mochi cakes made from layers of sweet rice steamed and shaped into cakes and seasoned, sometimes with coconut, represents the yearly culinary high point for some Asian Americans.

Cherry gluten-free Mochi Cakes: http://foodlibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/05/cherry-mochi-cakes-cute-and-gluten-free.html

Coffee Mochi Cakes: http://weekofmenus.blogspot.com/2010/08/coffee-mochi-cake-replacing-one-vice.html

Strawberry Mochi Cakes: http://fortwoplease.blogspot.com/2010/08/strawberry-mochi-cake.html

Watch Night Series: Part 1 Civil War Origins

Coconut layer cake, recipes below

Starting a series today on “Watch Night,” or the distinctive way African Americans have historically celebrated New Year’s Eve. I talk about this tradition in my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures. Watch Night dates back to the end of the Civil War. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln declared his famous Emancipation Proclamation, which set slaves in Confederate territories free as of January 1, 1863. As a result, African Americans across much of the South held religious services, many of them secretly, in which they praised and worshiped God as they watched the New Year and freedom arrive at midnight. Thus, after 1863, African Americans began observing Watch Night and New Year’s Eve in honor of Emancipation Day. Southerners carried their religious traditions with them when they migrated north to places like Philadelphia,  Pittsburgh, and New York including recipes for good old fashion church cakes as my mother likes to call them. Here a recipe for a coconut layer cake this is one of my favorite.

Georgia Coconut layer cake recipe: http://projects.eveningedge.com/recipes/coconut-layer-cake/

Vegan Coconut layer cake recipe: http://veganthyme.blogspot.com/2010/05/vegan-coconut-layer-cake-quilting-bee.html (recipe at the bottom of the page of this link)

Christmas Foodway Series: The Origins of Dumplings

Apple dumplings, recipes below (photograph by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books)

Dumplings and their multitude of cousins—wonton, ravioli, and matzo ball just to name a few—have an ancient history. The term dumpling first appears in written form about the start of the 17^th century. They all originated as poor folks attempt to provide an inexpensive, nutritious, and filling meal made from available produce and or scraps of meat tucked in a pastry made from different grains and fats mixed together in a flaky pocket and then baked, fried, or boiled. In the African American tradition dumplings have their roots all the way back to Africa, the European colonization of the Americas, and the African slave Trade. Who had the stronger influence on dumplings during the colonial period—European settlers or enslaved Africans—depended on what part of the Americas you are talking about and who settled where in what ethnic ratio. For example in the Chesapeake region which was pretty homogenous in terms of Africans and Europeans, Virginia slave Louis Hughes recalled, apple dumplings were a dish that “made old slaves smile for joy and the young fairly dance.” Here are some apple dumpling recipes below.

Traditional Apple Dumplings: http://acookandherbooks.blogspot.com/2010/10/classic-apple-dumplings-with-appearance.html

Pioneer Woman’s Apple Dumplings: http://catchingpennies.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/pioneer-womans-apple-dumplings/

Eve’s Red Hot Apple Dumplings: http://italianhandful.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/eves-red-hot-apple-dumplings/

Christmas Foodway Series: A Southern Christmas Without Chow-Chow?

Chow-Chow, recipes below

Maya Angelou’s grandmother operated a country store in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou’s grandmother used a combination of store profits, bartering, subsistence farming, canning, and the preparation of nitty-gritty good-tasting food to survive the Depression with dignity. Angelou and others I read expressed the view that a Christmas feast in the south would not be considered complete without chow-chow. My Grandma Opie from Cloverdale Virginia kept a bottle of chow-chow on the shelf of her refrigerator door. Chow-chows or chutneys are sweet and spicy hot pickled and canned end of the season garden produce. They most made with green and red tomatoes but some contain okra, carrots, onions, cabbage, beets or more and of course you can make them with fruits to for a sweet and savory taste. Chow-chows are served with or on black-eyed peas or pinto beans, corn bread, and meats to spice up the meal. Here are some chow-chow recipes to spice up your Christmas meal.

Chutney/Chow-chow recipes: http://www.armadillopeppers.com/Chow_Chow_Relish_Recipes.html

Traditional southern Chow-chow: http://unearthingthislife.blogspot.com/2010/11/chow-chow-family-recipe.html

Sweet chow-chow recipe: http://cookeatshare.com/recipes/sweet-chow-chow-437276

Christmas Foodway Series: Rum and Aguardiente

Slice of rum cake (click the photo to enlarge the image), recipes below

One traveler to Africa during the nineteenth century provides an account of a Hausa people in West Africa that had the tradition of placing a bottle of rum, some cooked food, other prized household articles “on the grave over the head” of the deceased. In the tropical regions of the Americas rum was a commodity that was produced and consumed locally (and often illicitly). In colonial North America Native Americans often traded furs, cedar wood, and other goods that European settlers prized for it. In Latin America it was called aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) and it was often at the center of economic, political, and social conflicts between local communities and the state. Aguardiente served as a marker of social status and cultural identity. In Cuba free white and colored laborers sat side by side drinking it along with their meal in bodegas which were small shops scattered about the back streets in urban centers. In rural nineteenth century Cuba enslaved Africans made culinary inventions from the extra “measure of rum,” their master’s doled out during the Christmas holidays. Here are recipes for rum cake which is very popular around the Christmas holiday.

Various Caribbean Rum cakes recipes: http://www.sheknows.com/food-and-recipes/articles/810171/yummy-rum-cake-recipes-1

Mexican Rum cookies and cake recipes: http://mexicanamericanbordercooking.blogspot.com/2010/04/rum-cake-cookies.html

Vegan Cuban Rum cake recipe: http://www.veganrepresent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7430

Christmas Foodway Series: Eggnog History Part 2

Eggnog Cheesecake with Caramel-Rum Sauce, recipes below

Yesterday I started the first of a two part story on the history of the Christmas holiday drink eggnog. The term eggnog evolved out of two slangs words used in urban areas like colonial New York, Boston, Charleston, and Mobile: colonist referred to rum as grog; bartenders served rum in small wooden carved mugs called noggins. Thus the drink eventually became egg-n-grog and over time eggnog. When the American Revolution resulted in dwindling trade between North America and the Caribbean, Americans began to substitute locally distilled spirits or moon-shine for rum in their eggnog. We also know that eggnog was popular drink in late nineteenth New Orleans. “I tremble to think” writes the traveler Abraham Oakey Hall in New Orleans about 1898, “nogs, and soups, and plates o fish, . . . game, . . . and loaves of bread, that I have seen appear from side doors and vanish . . . among the waiting crowds at the long counter; or of the piles of dimes” that barkeepers collected for the eggnog and food. In 1910 Harnet County, North Carolina we found that after opening presents on Christmas morning, young Erwin Stephens and his brother “went to the kitchen where eggnog spiked with whisky was served, the only time in the year.” Below I have a link to a bunch of eggnog recipes and a I really great eggnog cheesecake recipe.

Eggnog recipes: http://coffeetea.about.com/lr/egg_nog_recipes/1275603/1/

Eggnog Cheesecake with Caramel-Rum Sauce: http://castsugar.blogspot.com/2007/12/eggnog-cheesecake-with-caramel-rum.html

Vegan Eggnog Cheesecake: http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2006/12/vegan-eggnog-cheesecake.html

Christmas Foodway Series: Christmas Stockings

Brazil nut and coconut cookies, recipe below

On Christmas morning in Harnet County, North Carolina circa 1910, Erwin Stephens and his brother remember waking up and rushing to the living room to find out what had been stuffed in their Christmas stockings. They would fine apples, oranges, candy canes, walnuts, Brazil nuts, and perhaps a small toy. I found this scene described in Erwin Stephen’s memoir in the Duke University special collections a couple years back. The scene reminded me of Christmas presents made simple and yet very gratifying to young children. Why not reintroduce a tradition that proved so satisfying years ago? After your children or grand children open the stocking they can eat some of the goodies on the spot and use the others in a recipe. Here’s a Brazil nut recipe for the Holidays:

Chunky Brazil Nut and Coconut Cookies

Ingredients
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
Egg substitutes for 2 eggs (or 2 eggs)
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups sifted spelt four (or all-purpose flour)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups Brazil nut chunks
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Method
Pre-heat oven to 350°. Use an electric mixer and mix cream shortening, butter, and sugar until light. Add eggs beaten with vanilla extract. Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt; add to creamed mixture until well blended. Mix in the Brazil nut pieces and coconut. With a teaspoon, drop cookie dough onto Pam sprayed baking sheet, space approximately 2 inches apart. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Yields 5 dozen cookies.

Christmas Foodway Series: Culinary Attractions During the Antebellum Period

Oxtail stew, recipes below

In the sugar producing region of antebellum Louisiana, customarily one wealthy planter hosted a Christmas barbecue in which they invited as much as “three to five hundred” enslaved Africans “from neighboring plantations to join his own on the occasion,” Solomon Northup tells us. A former slave in Louisiana, he explains they would come “on foot, in carts, on horseback, on mules, riding double and triple,” for the food and fellowship around a large table “spread in the open air, and loaded with varieties of meat and piles of vegetables.” Open pit barbecued meats cooked “in the shade of wide branching trees” proved to be the main culinary attraction of these rural integrated Christmas suppers. Enslaved Africans would dig a pit and fill it with wood “burned until it is filled with glowing coals, over which chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and not [in]frequently the entire body of a wild ox [were] roasted.” In the Caribbean planters divided an ox among their slaves during the Christmas holiday along with “an extra allowance of yams, and flour or cornmeal, and a measure of rum,” observed one traveler. Oxtail remains a favorite Christmas dish among Jamaicans today. “Here we have it on the menu every day,” the Jamaican owner of a restaurant in the City Poughkeepsie told me. He added “back home it’s too expensive for most folks. So they only make it on holidays like Christmas.” Here are several oxtail stew recipes below.

West African oxtail stew http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Make-Traditional-Oxtail-Stew

South African oxtail stew: http://www.ehow.com/how_4802936_south-african-oxtail-stew.html

Southern oxtail stew: http://www.rumbameats.com/recipe.php?id=15&locale=en

Jamaican oxtail stew: http://foodjamaica.net/2008/04/17/oxtail-stew/

Spanish oxtail stew: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Spanish-Style-Oxtail-Stew/Detail.aspx

Christmas Foodway Series: Harlem During the Depression

Lemon meringue pie, recipes below

Dessert in most homes is perhaps the most celebrated part of the Christmas Day menu. As I have mentioned, in researching my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy, I conducted some thirty interviews with African Americans most of them born before 1945. Some never left the South, and others were southerners or the children of southerners who migrated to metropolitan New York. These were oral histories during which I asked seniors to talk about their Christmas memories from their childhood. Many of them had vivid memories of dessert. Ruth Thorpe was born in Harlem in 1932. Her mother migrated from Savanna, Georgia, to Harlem, where she worked as a professional cook. Migrants from the South and the Caribbean came to New York, Chicago and other northern cities during the era of the Depression in search of better opportunity. In their home regions they worked most often as agricultural laborers, waiters, domestic servants, and porters. She recalled that during the Depression in Harlem, “my mother made banana pudding, sweet potato pie, you know, apple pie, lemon meringue pie, and cakes.” When life gave Ruth’s mom lemons, she made a lemon meringue pie! Check out these recipes for lemon meringue pie.

Traditional lemon meringue pie recipe: http://judyandjoy.com/Recipes.html#lemon

Vegan lemon meringue pie recipe: http://veganfeastkitchen.blogspot.com/2009/06/vegan-lemon-meringue-pie.html

Christmas Foodway Series: In the Antebellum Period, Christmas Meant Turkey

Jerked Christmas turkey legs, greens, and rice and bean, recipes below

When most of think about Turkey we think about Thanksgiving. However, in parts of the antebellum south, those who could shoot them or afford to purchase one, Christmas meant a Turkey dinner. In the mid- nineteenth century, traveler Adam Hodgson passed through Alexandria, Petersburg, and Norfolk, Virginia during the Christmas holiday season. For lodging he did what most folks did before the advent of hotels, he stayed at inns, taverns, or rented a room at a private home. In his travel account Hodgson’s notes the centrality of the Turkey on the Christmas holiday table in circa 1820 Virginia. “At dinner, there are frequently four or five turkeys on the table,” meat, pastry, and tea. “While on the subject of eating . . . I will mention, that I do not recollect to have dined a single day, from my arrival in America till I left Virginia, without a turkey on the table; often two, in gentlemen’s houses. On Christmas-Eve, in the little town of Norfolk, Virginia, it was said that “6000 turkeys were [sold] in the market,” in preparation for the Christmas day meal. Below find recipes links for holiday turkeys, Caribbean rice and beans, and collard greens

Turkey recipes http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Food/Recipes/13-261-Turkey-Recipes.html

Traditional Rice and Beans Recipe:http://www.food.com/recipe/authentic-puerto-rican-rice-and-beans-96710

Vegan Rice and Beans Recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=4551.0

Pork Seasoned Greens: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/collard_greens_with_bacon/

Healthier Southern Greens: http://www.healthyselfandhome.com/InTheKitchen.html

Christmas Foodway Series: Remembering Mom's Fruit Cake

Fruit cake, recipe below

I writing my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures, I conducted oral histories interviews with people, most of them born before 1945. These are oral histories of people from the Caribbean and south talking about food. I interviewed Clara [Bullard] Pittman born in 1948 in Pinehurst, Georgia. She recalls that on Christmas her mother made homemade fruitcake from what she grew in her yard. The children of Caribbean parents I interviewed also associated childhood Christmas memories with homemade fruit cake. Making Christmas fruitcake was a long process, according to the 84 old Benjamin Outlaw. When asked what Christmas was like growing up in Windsor, North Carolina, Outlaw responded, “Oh boy, it was like heaven.” Mother “would start cooking her fruitcake, sometime about a month before Christmas. And she always made [either apple or grape] wine.” Hattie Outlaw poured the “wine on the cake until Christmas . . . building it up.” This must have worked to season the cake, “because it was the best fruitcake I have ever eaten.” Here is a host a fruit cake recipes.

Traditional Fruit cake recipes: http://mbgoodman.tripod.com/fruitcakerecipes.html

Drunken fruit cake http://www.cookiesncandy.com/2010/03/drunken-fruit-cake/

Vegan and Gluten-free fruit cake: http://jeenaskitchen.blogspot.com/2009/02/moist-fruit-cake-recipe-gluten-free.html

Christmas Foodway Series: The Brass People's “Greatest Religious Festival”

Curry goat served with fried plantains and a pasta salad, recipes below

Enslaved Africans in the Americas celebrated the Christmas holiday in an intuitive way that I argue scholars have not previously noted. For example, in his 1841 trip through the Niger River region William Allen found that the Brass people, associated in some way with the people of Benin, celebrated the “Marocho” at the completion of the sowing season “which occurs about our Christmas period of the year,” writes Allen. He adds it is the “greatest religious festival” with a weeklong of feasting on goat and poultry dishes as well as a steady succession of “dancing, singing, and firing of muskets.” In short, some Africans came to the Americas with a special occasion that included food, music, and dance at the Christmas time of the year. The description of the goat eaten during the Marocho in the Niger River region leads me to theorize perhaps that’s where dishes like curry goat became a part of Christmas culinary lexicon in the Caribbean. Africans introduced goat to Caribbean table and the English introduced the curry from their colonial holdings in East Asia. Here are curry goat recipes below you could use over the Christmas holiday; finding the ingredients these days is much easier than you think if you have have Caribbean folk living in your area and in most metropolitan centers there are various groups.

Curry goat video recipe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnl7Ckp9n28

Curry goat video recipe: http://www.vitalrecipe.com/view/2z1647wxl/the-ultimate-curry-goat-recipe/

Written curry goat recipe: http://recipes.caribseek.com/Jamaica/curry-goat.shtml

Christmas Foodway Series: Three Culinary Contributions

Southern banana pudding, recipes below

The Portuguese traveler Manuel Gonzales ventured through Great Britain during Christmas time in 1788. He found a “variety of puddings and some other items the most conspicuous among British Christmas dishes. Former British colonies around the world have a British culinary footprint that continues to shape the foods awe make and eat during the Christmas holidays. Two other cultures have also shaped the Christmas foods that we eat. If you have southern roots like my family when you think of a holiday pudding, you might think about rice and or banana pudding. Both are creolized southern dishes. Southeast Asians introduced bananas and new species of rice to Africa before the start of the Atlantic slave trade, and African cooks made milk based puddings before coming to the Americas. As yesterday’s post discussed, rice pudding showed up first in the slave quarters of the rice producing regions of low country South Carolina and Georgia. Later the United Fruit Company of Boston introduced bananas to the U. S. south and southwest at the turn of the century. Thereafter southerners started making rich and delicious banana pudding. Thus the rice and banana puddings my southern ancestors made in Virginia and North Carolina developed from three old world culinary contributions—Asian, British, and African. Where did baking banana pudding with vanilla wafers on top originate?

Southern Banana Pudding: http://www.texascooking.com/features/apr99bestbanana.htm

Southern Fat free vegan banana pudding: http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/05/southern-style-banana-pudding.html

Southern Gluten-Free Banana pudding: http://glutenfreecooking.about.com/od/dessertsandsweets/r/Southern-Style-Gluten-Free-Banana-Meringue-Pudding.htm

Christmas Foodway Series: African Precursors in Lowcountry Carolina and Georgia

Rice pudding, recipes below

Foodways is the study of the tradition, culture, and history behind why we eat what we eat. In my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy, I talk a great deal about rice and African culinary culture. West Africans groups between Cape Verde and the Gold Coast cultivated so much rice that they became known as the people of the Rice Coast. Explorer Joseph Hawkins observed that in addition to a few other culinary delights and palm wine, if the Igbo “possess[ed] rice . . . a few goats or sheep, to afford them occasionally milk . . . they enjoy consummate happiness.” We also know that the Mande along the Gambia River made a type of cornmeal-based pudding made with milk and water called nealing, which was perhaps first made with millet. Traveler Mongo Park tells us that, during lean times, the Mande also ate “a pleasant gruel called fondi” for breakfast made from foraged berries, millet, or couscous. Both nealing and fondi seem like the precursors of rice puddings and custards made so popular by enslaved cooks on lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. It was enslaved Africans that introduced rice culture and cooking techniques to a largely British master class and poorer white overseers who lived regions with black majorities. Africans brought the rice to the table and the English brought the spices, sugar, and a well established pudding culture of their own from England. Today rice culture is ingrained in the foodways of low country folks of all classes and complexions and a Christmas spread without it in some shape or form would be a culinary sin!

Carolina rice pudding: http://www.carolinagoldricefoundation.org/recipes/rice_pudding/rice_pudding.html

Quick rice pudding: http://www.weheartfood.com/2007/05/lisas-quick-rice-pudding.html

Vegan rice pudding: http://cheaphealthygood.blogspot.com/2010/03/veggie-might-vegan-rice-pudding-or-what.html