A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Peru

Peruvian Olluquito con Charqui, recipe below

In the Indigenous societies of the Andes, women planted and harvested the fields and prepared the food. Men hunted animals and raised like stock including alpaca and llama. The women would slaughter the animals and prepare it for eating. Pre-Columbian Inca women developed dishes using a cured, salted, and dehydrated meat they called charqui. The English word Jerky comes from the Andean word charqui. The women would salt cure the meat and dry it in the hot sun and freezing cold for about a month and thereby increasing its longevity. In pre-Colombian Africa, Mande women made jerked salted and dried meat in the sun in a similar way. From the Jerked meat Andean women made a soup called Olluquito con charqui made with ollucos (a yellow Andean tuber), traditionally women used slices of jerked alpaca and llama, but today its more often made with jerked beef, and served with rice.

Olluquito con Charqui Recipe

Ingredients
4 ysp oil
1 tsp cayenne pepper
¼ kg “charqui” or jerked meat/vegan substitute
1 kg ollucos chopped in fine strips
½ cup onion
Chopped parsley
2 garlic cloves
Salt and pepper
ground chilly

Method

Shred and fry pre-soaked/hydrated Charqui. After browned, remove, and in the same oil fry onions, garlic, chilly and cayenne pepper. Add ollucos (soaked for 1 hour with salt). Cover the pot and cook at low heat. Sprinkle with parsley. Serve with white rice. Makes eight servings

Annual Lima Food Festival video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZj0lNzmlkE

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: African Survivals

Chicken and dumplings, recipes below

Today let’s explore women's history through chicken dumpling (also spelled “Chicken ’n’ Dumplings). Sources reveal that West African women prepared chicken together with collard greens and dumplings many centuries ago. The tradition survived the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and sharecropping with mention of it in the oral histories I conducted while researching my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures. For example, Ruth Thorpe Miller’s mother from Savannah made chicken ’n’ dumplings long after migrating to Harlem in the 1920s. Maggie White from Windsor, North Carolina migrated to Ossining, New York, in Westchester County, 30 minutes north of New York City. During the Great Depression she kept her “big boned” children filled with chicken ’n’ dumplings during the holidays. As a child in in 1940s Alabama, Joyce White recalls the smell of her mother cooking Chicken ’n’ Dumplings, “which was made with a big hen.” Here are some Chicken ’n’ Dumpling recipes below.

Savannah Chicken and dumplings: http://community.tasteofhome.com/forums/t/110783.aspx

Vegan chicken and dumplings: http://kathrynlovett.com/2010/10/26/monday-vegan-chicken-and-dumplings/

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Norma Darden & Vertamae Grosvenor

Norma Darden (left) co-owner of the Harlem eateries Spoonbread Too: Miss Mamie's and Miss Maude's, recipe link below

I was in Harlem yesterday shooting an episode of a NYC Media series called Appetite City hosted by former New York Times food critique William Grimes. We shot the episode at Miss Maude's Spoonbread Too located at547 Lenox Ave in Harlem. The series will air this coming August of on NYC Media’s cable station. Ms. Norma Garden, a former fashion model, owns the restaurant and she was there and graciously signed a copy of her book and served up some great cake. Her sister Carole Darden is the chief baker of the restaurants. As part of my Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series I offer the following prerecorded interview with Ms. Darden and Vertmae Grosvenor on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. The link to the show includes some fine recipes too.

Listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=971241

Guest:

• Vertamae Grosvenor, NPR contributor and author several cook books/food anthropologies
• Norma Jean Darden, co-author of Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences from a Black Family and the owner with her sister Carole Darden of Spoonbread Too: Miss Mamie's and Miss Maude's located in Harlem.

Related Links:

· William Grimes: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/appetite-city-culinary-history-new-york

· Review of Miss Maude’s: http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/miss-maudes-spoonbread-too/

· NYC Media: http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/html/nyc_media_shows/list.shtml

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Alabama

Benne Seed Wafers, history and ingredients below 

In 1895 and 1896 African-American farmers in the vicinity of Tuskegee, Alabama, generally worked “about seven and a half months during the year” according to researchers from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. “The rest of the time,” says one researcher, “is devoted to visiting, social life, revivals, [and] other religious exercises . . . .” During the “laying-by time,” while the crops were maturing, African-American farmers near Tuskegee held “bush meetings,” revivals, and visited friends for sometimes a whole week at a time. Women served guest something to eat and drink like Benne Seed Wafers and some iced tea. Africans brought Benne (the Bantu word for sesame) seeds to the Americas from sub-Saharan Africa in the 17th century during the Atlantic slave trade. It is one of the oldest cultivated crops grown for its mild nutty-taste, enslaved Africans planted this versatile plant around the borders of their gardens in Alabama and other parts of the South. Benne is high in protein, has no cholesterol and is rich in calcium, iron, zinc, and vitamins B and E.



Benne Seed Wafer Recipe


Ingredients
1 cup sesame seeds
4 tablespoons of butter (or butter substitute) softened
1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg (or egg substitute) beaten
¾ cup spelt flour (or all purpose flour)
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
1/3 tsp ground allspice
1/8 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fresh orange juice
¼ tsp grated orange peel
½ tsp vanilla extract


Method
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a heavy skillet, toast seeds over low heat until golden brown then transfer to place to cool. With an electric blender, cream butter and sugar together and mix in eggs, flour, salt, spices, and baking powder to form a soft dough. Drop with a teaspoon onto a well-greased cookie pan, far enough apart to allow spreading while baking. Bake for 10-15 minutes then allow wafers to cool before serving makes 2 dozen.

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Brazil

Acarajé Vender in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, recipes below

The origins of Brazil’s popular fast foods date back to the African slave trade. By the 1620s “Brazil absorbed a migration of some 500,000 to 600,000 slaves from Africa up to 1700” write historians Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson. Although they were enslaved people, Afro-Brazilian women entrepreneurs sold prepared foods such as acarajé, on the streets of Bahia and Rio. Originally a popular West African dish, particularly in Senegal, Nigeria, and Ghana, Afro-Brazilian women street venders continue to sell acarajé long after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Acarajé is a black-eyed pea cake fried in dendê oil (palm oil) and split open like a hot-dog bun served stuffed with vatapá and caruru– spicy sauces made from shrimp, cashews, palm oil and other ingredients. As I talk about in my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy, black-eye peas came from Africa where they are known as cow peas. Here are two recipes for acarajé, one traditional and the other vegan:

Traditional acarajé recipe: http://www.whats4eats.com/appetizers/akkra-recipe

Vegan acarajé recipe: http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Acaraj%C3%A9

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: The Women of Cloverdale, Virginia

Hot cross buns, recipe included

My Grandmother Lucy Opie was one of many women who migrated from Cloverdale, Virginia to North Tarrytown in the late 1920s or the early 1930s. In North Tarrytown, the majority of the southern-born migrant women came from Virginia, followed by North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Maryland, in descending amounts. Most of them rented homes, creating a black enclave in the Valley Street section of town. They worked predominately at private homes for white residents as cooks, live-in domestic servants, and laundresses. Lucy Opie did domestic work, particularly cooking. A superb cook, she prepared traditional southern dishes. What was unique about her cooking, according to her daughter Dorothy Opie, was, “the first ingredient she put in was a piece of love, stirred it up.” She was an excellent baker, often preparing biscuits, pies, and an Easter time favorite I grew up eating at Grandma's house—hot cross buns!

Hot cross bun recipe: http://www.dltk-holidays.com/easter/hotcrossbuns.htm

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Africa

Photo from http://blog.worldvision.org.uk/, fish recipes below

Enslaved African women from many different culinary traditions entered the Americas starting in the sixteenth century. Mande women also identified in primary sources as Mandingo and Mandinka women lived in the geographic area of the present-day countries of Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, among others. They came from largely agrarian societies but those who lived in the vicinity of the large rivers worked chiefly wish fish. Men fished and the women helped prepared them for sale and ran local fish markets. Pounding the entire fish in a wooden mortar as they came out of the water and exposing them to dry in the sun represented the most common way of preparing them for sale. Fish could be purchased in a variety of ways including fresh caught or preserved in salt. Here are a number of fish recipes from Africa and different parts of the Americas that seems most appropriate during the Lenten season.

African fish stew recipe

Ingredients

Use dried or fresh fish (sea bass, croakers, porgies or rock)
Vegetable oil
Green bell pepper
Onion
4 ripe tomatoes diced or 1 can of crushed who tomatoes

Thyme
Salt
Black pepper

Method

Use dried fish that needs to be soaked overnight to hydrate or cut up, season, and fry fish. Sauté onions and green bell peppers in a skillet. Remove mixture from skillet and add to fish in saucepan. Add tomatoes and stir. Sprinkle thyme, salt, and black pepper to taste. Cover; simmer for about 15 minutes. Serve with rice or cassava, serves 4.

Ackee, codfish, and callaloo recipe: http://www.thedowntownfoodie.com/2010/09/cod-salted-fishwith-callalol-and-ackee.html

Fish and grits recipe: http://www.esquire.com/features/guy-food/fish-and-grits-recipe-ll-0309

Encebollado de pescado récipe: http://laylita.com/recipes/2008/03/01/encebollado-de-pescado-or-tuna-soup/

Moroccan-Salmon recipe: http://www.oprah.com/food/Moroccan-Salmon-with-Cabbage-and-Couscous

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Grandma

Southern Corn bread, recipe below

My maternal Grandmother, Luesta Duers, was the grand matriarch of my family. Here home in Ossining, New York served at the meeting place for her family and extended family including all my cousins from New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore. A native of Windsor, North Carolina, the story goes Grandma originally left Windsor to earn a teacher’s certificate at North Carolina Normal School for teachers. She dropped out of school, eloped, and migrated with her husband to Philadelphia. Apparently a sister sent word to her and her other sister Maggie that she had jobs lined up for them in Ossining. Grandma was the upstairs maid and my great aunt Bertha was downstairs, they all did domestic work. For allot of women of the 1940s and 1950s, especially black women, those were the jobs available to them. It was my grandmother, the former domestic servant, who when she heard I needed one, used some of her savings to purchase my first laptop computer when I entered a doctoral program in history at Syracuse University in the early 1990s. Like many women of her generation, Grandma lived frugally and invested in the education of their children and grandchildren. I heard film maker Spike Lee share a similar story; his maternal grandmother from Georgia, who was an educator, saved her money and paid for most if not all of his Morehouse College Education. Like Spike I’m northern born with a southern grandmother. In the North, cooks continued the southern tradition of regularly baking corn bread, but for some unknown reason it took on a distinctively sweeter taste. Southerners dismissed the sweeter northern interpretation of corn bread as unfit for consumption. However, over time, the corn bread of newcomers from the South became more northern in style, just like the migrants themselves. My grandmother retained the tradition of making un-sweet corn bread and here is a recipe similar to hers.

Southern Country Cornbread
2 cups of buttermilk (or 2 cups of vanilla soymilk)
½ teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water
2 large eggs
¾ cup corn, canola or vegetable oil
Mix eggs and milk together
Sift in 2 cups of corn meal with a teaspoon of salt and 2 teaspoons of baking powder or use self-rising cornmeal (I add just a little high source of fiber, just a little!)
Mix ingredients and if you’re northerner like me add a ¼ cup of sugar
Spray hot biscuit pan (or cast Iron skillet like I like to use) with nonstick cooking spray
Preheat oven at 425 then turn down to 375 and bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden brown
Brush with melted butter when done and enjoy!

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Angustias Farrera

La Negra Negustias is a little known novel by the Mexican author Francisco Rojas González about la coronela Angustias Farrera, a Afro Mexican mulatto women who served as a colonel under Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1916). Published in 1944, I came across the novel in a book store of the Fondo de Cultura Economica while studying in Guadalajara, Mexico in the early 1990s; González is a native of Guadalajara. I also came a across a film version of the novel while in graduate school at Syracuse University. The novel is notable because it delves into the African presence in Mexico outside of traditional Afro Mexican communities in places like La Costa Chica in the state of Guerrero, the resistance of the young and attractive Angustias to the traditional roles of women in rural Mexican society, and the conditions in rural societies that led peasant farmers and agricultural workers to take up arms against Mexico’s landed oligarchy and the dictator Porfirio Diaz. The novel also discusses the sexism and racism that Angustias had to overcome as she rose up through the ranks of the revolutionary army and how she gained the respect of the soldiers under her authority. Thus the book is provides an interesting alternative to paternalistic view of women in Mexican literature as subservient dutiful wives, domestic servants, mothers who raise children and cook great food. What also remains a mystery to me is how this winner of the Mexican National Price in Literature remains virtually unknown to many academics who study the African presence in Mexico and the Mexican Revolution. Here are some Mexican recipes and related links to this post.

Mexican history and recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=mexico

Related link on Francisco Rojas González: http://www.tower.com/la-negra-angustias-francisco-rojas-gonzalez-paperback/wapi/112428697

Laura Kanost, "Viewing the Afro-Mexican Female Revolutionary: Fransico Rojas Gonzalelz's La Negra Angustias": http://www.jstor.org/stable/25758234

Aretha Franklin The Queen of Soul

Shrimp and grits and other recipes below 

We call James Brown the God Father of Soul, Gladys Knight the Empress of Soul and Aretha Franklin the Queen of Soul. Born in 1942 in Memphis Tennessee, Franklin migrated with family first to Buffalo, New York, and then to Detroit Michigan where her father the Reverend C. L. Franklin served as the pastor of a Baptist Church. Her parents split up in Buffalo and her mother died when she was ten; Franklin’s grandmother raised her in Detroit’s motor city whose auto industry attracted thousands of southern migrants. Franklin grew up singing in her father’s church and recorded her first album in 1961. In 1987, Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with 20 number 1 Bill Board chart R & B hit singles and 20 Grammy awards. But before she became a cross over celebrity, Franlkin started singing on the Chitlin Circuit in the early 1960s. A string of black-owned honky-tonks, nightclubs, and theaters, the circuit weaved throughout the Southeast and Midwest and included Paschal’s Carousel Lounge in Atlanta, Chicago’s Regal Theater; The Royal in Baltimore; and New York’s Apollo Theater to name just a few places. Entertainers called it the Chitlin’ Circuit because some club owners sold soul food dishes out of their kitchens and eateries opened nearby some of these venues. In my book Hog Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents I talk about One of Aretha Franklin’s favorite eateries, Kelly’s restaurant in Atlantic City. Franklin loved Kelly’s hot sauced wings and grits. Here are some grits and pozole recipes below.

Shrimp and Grits: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=443571

Vegetarian Menudo: http://recipes.chef2chef.net/recipe-archive/56/299250.shtml

Vegetarian Pozole: http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/soup/recipe-vegetarian-posole-075578

Garlic cheese grits: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=853994

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Mayann

Louie Armstrong, New Orleans red beans recipes below

The great jazz trumpeter Louie “Satchmo” Armstrong referred to his mother Mary Albert (1886–1942) as “Mayann.” According to him she was a great cook who for little money could whip up a meal that could make your mouth water just smelling it. Born in 1901 into poverty, Satchmo lived on and off with his mother do to the family’s precarious financial situation. Like a lot of poor African American women in New Orleans Armstrong’s mother, in his words, worked hard as a domestic in “white folk’s yards, washing, ironing and taking care of the white kids,” to feed her family. He proudly remembers how is mother Mayann “could work miracles” at the grocery store in his neighborhood. “She went to Zatteran’s grocery, and bought a pound of red beans, a pound of rice, a big slice of fat back [salt pork bacon that contained more fat than meat] and a big red onion,” recalls Satchmo. “At Stahle’s bakery she got two loaves of stale bread for a nickel. She boiled this jive down to a gravy, and . . . we would smell her pot almost a block away. Mayann could really cook” after “two encores” of red beans and rice, “I had to get up from the table for fear I would hurt myself.” Below find some recipes for red beans and rice.

New Orleans Red Beans History and Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/2011/01/rice-and-beanspeas-and-rice-series-part_19.html

A Culinary Celebration of Women’s History Month Series: Dulceras

Dulcera selling coconut sweets in the the province of Peravia, Dominican Republic, recipes below (photo from http://www.listindiario.com/la-vida/2010/7/2/148841/Dos-dulceras-banilejas)

Iberians in the sugar producing regions of colonial Latin America and Brazil devoured dulces (sweets) created largely by Afro-Hispanic women known as dulceras. About noon they roamed the streets of urban centers with platters of sweets for sale ousted on their heads. They sold cakes, pies, and in the words of one visitor to Havana in the nineteenth century “little bowls and cups of freshly made sweetmeats, preserved guavas and mammees (an apple like fruit), grated coconut stewed in sugar, and a very delicious custard made with cocoanut-milk, besides various other fruit-preparations.” These venders worked for masters who sent them out to hawk their wares as part of what was called in colonial Latin America the jornal system. This system gave enslaved African women who came from societies in which women ran local food markets in Africa an opportunity to use their entrepreneurial skills with the understanding that they would give the majority of their earnings to their masters and keep the rest (say for example, 25 cents of every dollar). The key here is that these women had lucrative culinary skills that their owners needed and thus provided the enslaved person a degree of leverage within an oppressive relationship. It was dulceras across Latin America that one finds in the historic records as some of the first enslaved people who earned enough income to purchase their freedom, that of loved ones, and often go on to establish profitable eateries such as taverns and boarding houses with employees. Today the tradition continues in sugar cane producing regions such as the Dominican Republic (DR). Below are a number of recipes from Caribbean and Brazil and a interesting article on the tradition today the DR.

Baked pineapple with coconut dulces recipe: http://canelakitchen.blogspot.com/2010/06/baked-pineapple-with-coconut-and-honey.html

Dulce de leche: http://paintinglilies.com/2009/09/02/dulce-de-leche-and-alfajores/

Related Article: http://www.listindiario.com/la-vida/2010/7/2/148841/Dos-dulceras-banilejas

Brazilian Beijinhos de Coco (Coconut Kisses) recipe

Ingredients

A can of sweetened condensed milk (vegans, I substitute plant based products for this and the other ingredients in this recipe)
2 egg yolks
1 tbsp butter or margarine
1 lb freshly grated coconut
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

Mix all the ingredients together completely. Cook using a heavy saucepan and keep stirring until you see the bottom of the pan. Pour into a plate and let it cool completely. Grease your hands then make small balls, roll them in sugar and put them on small pieces of wax paper. Recipes makes 30 kisses.