Traveling To College For the First Time: No Lunch Was a Real Lunch Without Fried chicken

Southern fried chicken, recipes below

Here is a passage from literary great James Weldon Johnson's autobiography in which he tells the story of traveling from his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida to Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia. Johnson, who was bilingual, was traveling with his Cuban classmate Ricardo and the two of them were eating a lunch that Johnson's mother prepared for the Jim Crow train ride to Atlanta as the young men headed off to start their first year of college: “The train pulled out and we settled down comfortably in one seat after having arranged our packages, among which was a box of lunch,” recalls Johnson. “In those days no one would think of boarding a train without a lunch, not even for a trip of two or three hours; and no lunch was a real lunch that did not consist of fried chicken, slices of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs, a little paper of salt and pepper, and orange or two, and a piece of cake. . . . A number of colored people had got on the train but we were the only ones in the first-class car. Before we could open our lunch the conductor came round. I gave him the tickets, and he looked at them and looked at us.” Johnson goes on to say, “Then he said to me gruffly, ‘You had better get out of this car and into the one ahead.’ ‘But,’ I answered, ‘we have first class tickets; and this the first-class car, isn’t it?’ It is probable that the new law was very new to him, and he said not unkindly, ‘You’ll be likely to have trouble if you try to stay in this car.’ Ricardo . . . asked me, ‘Que dice?’ (What is he saying?).” Johnson explained to Ricardo in Spanish that the conductor demanded that they live the whites only first class car. “We decided to stay where we were. But we did not have to enforce the decision. As soon as the conductor heard us speaking a foreign language, his attitude changed; he punched our tickets and them back, and treated us just as he did the other passengers in the car. We ate our lunch, lay back in our seats, and went to sleep. . . .This was my first impact against race prejudice as a concrete fact. I like this story because it’s about food and it illustrates one of the myriad of ways black southerners negotiated Jim Crow laws in the south.

Related Links

Fried chicken recipe: http://americanfood.about.com/od/chickenrecipes/ss/Fried-Chicken-Recipe.htm

Video vegan fried chicken recipe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te6Cv7RTazU

James Weldon James post with related recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=+James+Weldon+Johnson

Earth Eats Radio podcast and blog series on back to school :

http://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/school-part-1-start-day/

http://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/school-part-2-good-food-campus/

Satchmo's School Lunch in New Orleans: Back To School Series Part 1

Louis Armstrong at the Aquarium in New York 1946, Photographer Bill Gottlieb (Courtesy of the Library of Congress), related links and recipes below

Summer vacation is just about over and my two children return to elementary school this week. In addition, both my wife and I are professors and the first days of classes at our college also start this week. As two working parents we divide our tasks and I as the foodie in the family make breakfast, school snacks, and lunches for my children. Coming up with delicious and eye pleasing food for them is challenging and particularly so because we are committed to eating nutritious food and when they get to school they are comparing and contrasting what I prepare for them with parents wedded to the Standard American Diet (SAD) which is most often SAD sweet, salty, and fatty heavily processed foods. As a blogger interested in staying relevant so I’m launching a back to school and work series.  I’ve uncovered allot of sources on the topic during more than ten years of archival research. Some of the post will be part memoir revisiting my childhood and colleges days. Today let’s turn to one of my favorite foodies—Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Talking about his childhood in New Orleans and his mother, Armstrong writes, “When Mayann was living with stepfather Tom [who] was working at the DeSoto Hotel on Barrone and Perdido Streets. When he came home he brought with him a lot of ‘broken arms’ which were the leftovers from the tables he served. From them Mayann would fix a delicious lunch for me which I took to school when her work kept her away from home all day long. When I undid these wonders in the schoolyard, all the kids would gather around me like hungry wolves. It did not take them long to discover what I had: the best steaks, chops, chicken, eggs, a little of everything that was good.”

My Satchmo stories and recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Louis+Armstrong

Children’s breakfast, lunch, and snack ideas: 

http://www.gov.ns.ca/hpp/publications/05092_BreakfastLunchSnackIdeasBooklet_En.pdf

http://familyfun.go.com/back-to-school/back-to-school-lunches-snacks/

http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/everydaycooking/family/schoollunchesforkids

Michael Jackson' and The Chitlin’ Circuit

The Jackson Five with Michael holding the mic in front 

Today is Michael Jackson's birthday.  As a historian the images of MJ and the Jackson Five at the start of their career in the 1960s and stories about how the group got its break has always captivated me. Before the 1970s, black groups like the Jackson Five and entertainers like James Brown, Ray Charles, and Gladys Knight made their living on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” a string of black-owned honky-tonks, nightclubs, and more elaborate theaters. The circuit weaved throughout the Southeast and Midwest, stretching from Nashville to Chicago, to the Jackson’s hometown of Gary, Indiana, and into New York. The Jacksons would have often done consecutive one-night stands, frequently more than 800 miles apart. The routine went: drive for hours, stop, set up, play for five hours, breakdown, and drive for several more hours. On the road, performers often settled for sandwiches from the coloured window of segregated restaurants until they arrived at the next venue. The Chitlin’ Circuit was crucial to artists like the Jacksons because it was the only way to perform when the white media did not cover black artists. The entertainers called it the Chitlin’ Circuit because club owners sold chitlin’s and other soul food dishes out of their kitchens. Early in her career, Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit where she played at “roadside joints and honky-tonks across the South,” she recalled. “No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters, or pig ear sandwiches in a corner.” The circuit went beyond small hole-in-the-wall clubs, however. Elaborate African-American-operated theaters like the Regent in Washington, D.C., the Uptown in Philadelphia, the Apollo in New York, the Fox in Detroit, and the Regal in Chicago, were big-time venues considered part of the circuit. In a TV interview last night with Barbara Walters, Gladys Knight recalled seeing the Jackson Five for the first time at the Regal in Chicago and immediately calling Motown’s Barry Gordy telling him he had to audition them. In short, theatres on the circuit were particularly important to black artists like MJ who were not given the opportunity to play in mainstream venues because of racist whites in the entertainment business. Because MJ made it look so easy, most of us forgot just how hard it was for him and the Jackson Five when they started so many decades ago.

Series on the Movie the Help: Montgomery’s “Club from No Where”

Photo of a MIA Taxi, related recipes and links below

I've been talking about the role of black domestic in the civil rights movement. It's my response to the faulty revisionist history in the movie The Help. For example, black domestics in Alabama played an essential role to the success of the Club from No Where and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. The boycott lasted 380 days with the domestics who supported it walking and hitching rides. In order to keep domestics off the bus and other riders, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) had to come up with its own transportation system to get African Americans to work; many of them maids and cooks for Montgomery’s white establishment. The MIA organized a carpool to shuttle its members to work. This meant raising the funds necessary to purchase a fleet of vehicles and gas for the car pool. Georgia Gilmore and the various members of The Club from Nowhere around the city of Montgomery sold fresh baked goods and the proceeds went to the MIA. The club name allowed them to earn money for the movement without raising the suspicion of white officials and members of the Klan. Their customers including both whites and blacks who purchases of heavenly tasting food at cab stands, barber shops, and beauty salons kept the MIA transportation network rolling. More on the MIA, MLK and food tomorrow. 


Here is a oatmeal raisin cookie recipe that reminds of what might have been sold to support the bus boycott in 1955: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/oatmeal_raisin_cookies/


My series on The Help with recipes:http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Help

Related Link on The Help: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/08/12/kathryn-stockett-is-not-my-sister-and-i-am-not-her-help/

Help Me Talk About Domestic Servants and the Civil Rights Movement

Domestic worker walking during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, pound cake recipes below  

Today I want to continue my discussion on the movie The Help with a look at agency of domestic servants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (see earlier post on the boycott http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=montgomery). In order for the boycott to work, dozens of domestic servants had to agree to stay off the Jim Crow buses in Montgomery, Alabama. This meant that the majority of domestic servants had to walk back and forth to work or to the newly established Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) car pool locations that shuttled them between their neighborhoods and closer proximity to their jobs. We often talk about the role Martin Luther King (MLK) played in maintaining solidarity among the often fragmented leadership of the MIA and how his oratory help maintain the morale of the rank and file members of the MIA, he no doubt played an important role. But ultimately I argued the domestic servants also played a critical role too. Without out agreeing to walk instead of ride on the busses, the boycott would have failed. When a reporter asked one such domestic how she was holding up with so much walking during the boycott which lasted for 13months between 1955 and 1956 she responded, “My feet is tired, but my soul is rested.” Here is my interpretation of the pound cake recipe from the MIA founding raising arm who called themselves the Club from Nowhere and some additional recipes

Translated Simple Pound Cake Recipe:
1 pound butter substitute like Smart Balance
3 cups sugar
5 eggs (or egg substitute)
3 cups cake flour (you can get whole grain cake flour like baking with spelt flour)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup soy milk
A splash of vanilla, almond, or lemon extract

Method:
Mix butter, sugar, and eggs. Beat until light. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Add slowly to butter mixture alternating with milk. Bake for about an hour and some change at 325

Vegan pound cake recipe: http://aveganfordinner.blogspot.com/2006/12/promised-poundcake-and-pizza-friday.html

Mississippi and the Civil Rights Movement Recordings: http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/americanradioworks/2011/state_of_siege.mp3?_kip_ipx=292763658-1314152597

Let Me Help You Learn about Black Women's Organizations in the South

The family of a Tuskegee Institute professor, circa 1920s

Doing a series of post on the Movie The Help based on my own research on southern women and life in the Jim Crow South. Today let me say the obvious which the movie does not: Not all black women in the south worked as domestics. Yes it represented one of the most common forms of employment of black women, but there existed a class of black elites in the south that did not work outside the home. For example a group of women who lived on and around the campus of black colleges organized Woman’s Clubs a self-help and philanthropic groups for well off black women. Most of these black self-help organizations were controlled by upper class women. For example, the Tuskegee Women’s Club, started in 1895, only admitted female faculty members of Tuskegee Institute or wives or female relatives of male Tuskegee faculty.  Most of these women’s clubs left a more substantial paper trail about their struggles to stop the tide of lynching that racked the country at the turn of the century than on their efforts to reduce the amount fried foods African American ate. African American Margaret Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, and founder of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, was a typical progressive era reformer in many ways but not in others. She championed Tuskegee’s mantra of “Bath, Broom, and Bible,” that is cleanliness and Christian morality. What was different about her and other black reformers of the turn of the century was a conservative black nationalism that emphasized teaching black history and encouraging black landownership which she believed would lead to black economic independence. The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi, the home of Jackson State College a historically black college. The city of Jackson, the state capital, had a vibrant population of black college students, professors, and other black professionals. In fact the students from the college worked closely with other members of the city's black community in creating a strong civil rights movement led in Jackson by the NAACP's Medger Evers. But you would never get that from seeing The Help because it depicts black folks on the whole as one dimensional and too scared to challenge white supremacy. 

Tuskegee Stories and Related Recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Tuskegee+

Let Me Help You Get More Complex Look at The South

Sharecroppers in the South circa 1938 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)  

The movie The Help portrays white female bosses as racist and intolerant of black employees. That’s just too simplistic. I learned through oral histories with southerners that during the Depression southern hospitality sometimes prevailed over Jim Crow in the lives of some southern whites who cooked for and ate with the African Americans they knew intimately such as the cooks, live-in domestic servants, chauffeurs, laundresses, and agricultural workers they employed. As the child of a tenant farmer in South Carolina, Nora Burns White procured at least one big meal a week by wandering over to the landlord’s door about a block away at mealtime on Sundays to take advantage of his southern hospitality. The water pump for both houses was naturally next to the landlord’s house. So, she would time her trip to the water pump based on when the landlord’s family, the Rosses, were seated to eat their Sunday meal. “I would sit my pail down at the pump and go on up to the kitchen and open the door and say ‘good evening.’ Mrs. Carrie Ross would say, ‘come on in Nora, sit over here.’” Nora sat down to a typical Sunday meal in South Carolina of collard greens seasoned with salt pork, peas and rice, corn bread, ham, and fried chicken. “I’d get up when I was finished and say ‘thank you ma’am’, get the pail of water, and go on home.”  This went on for years during the Depression before her mother figured out what was going on. “It seemed like their food was better . . . The best corn bread.” In addition to feeding the children of their tenants, some southern planters provided meals for their black laborers. For example, Monday through Saturday Carrie Ross distributed freshly baked corn bread and coffee to the black farmhands that worked for the family in Blaney, South Carolina.  As a result, Ms. Carrie became an expert at baking large batches of mouth-watering corn bread. Similarly, in Alabama, the parents of James Warren, born in 1925, regularly fed black hands on the family’s cotton farm near Birmingham. “They would sometimes come in for dinner on Sundays. They would always ask mom to cook black-eyed peas.” In short, race relations and employee and employer relations were far more complex than one sees in the movie The Help.

Traditional hoppin’ John: http://dining.discoversouthcarolina.com/famous-flavors/hoppin-john.aspx

Vegan hoppin’ John: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipeId=406

My series on The Help: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Help

Related Link on The Help: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/08/12/kathryn-stockett-is-not-my-sister-and-i-am-not-her-help/

Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=26520&content=toc

White Employers, Black Domestics, and Infrapolitics

90 year old Ella Gold Baker July 2005, recipe below

Historically African-American elders made sure that black youths clearly understood the particularities, dictates, and customs of interacting with white folks in eateries or their homes as live-in domestic servants, seamstress, and laundresses. Interacting with white folks could be a degrading and even dangerous experience, because in the words of one interviewee, you never knew when some volatile white southerner was going to “go off.” Ella (Christopher) Barnett was born in the rural farming community of Cloverdale, Virginia in 1915. She remembered that when she was thirteen she worked for a white women and her husband as a domestic in Cloverdale and “they were as nasty as they could be to colored people. . . colored people had a hard time.” Barnett eventually migrated to Tarrytown, New York where she worked as a cook for a white family until she retired. Thus she protested intolerable conditions by migrating North.  Interviews with southerners indicate that African Americans did not simply capitulate to Jim Crow conditions in the South and nasty white folks but employed what one scholar calls “infrapolitics.” These included such everyday forms of resistance as theft and employing what one historian calls the “cult of Sambohood”: using grins, shuffles, and “yassums” to get what one needed without violence. In the movie The Help black domestic are viewed as almost helpless in their relationships with nasty white employers. There exception including the famous pie scene; an item that found while cleaning and pawned, and the mention that the main character writes down her prayers in a book. The book provides fuller description of a prayer warrior who in biblical tradition uses prayer as form of resistance against those doing. It's another example of infrapolitics in which one confronts, evades, and resist  powerful people and something that the book addresses well and Hollywood all but dismisses. Interviews I did showed countless examples of infrapolitics from migrating, stealing, and as I will discuss tomorrow, toting. 

Ella Barnett and a recipe for apple molasses bread: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/04/molasses-and-virginia-foodways.html

Corn and Entrepreneurs

Chicken Cornbread Pie, recipe below

Poet Maya Angelou was born in 1928 in St. Louis but she spent the majority of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas where she lived in the rear of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store with her grandmother and uncle. Angelou describes her grandmother as great cook and entrepreneur. For example, years earlier, her grandmother saved the capital necessary to start the store selling food to laborers in the town’s saw mill and cotton gin located at opposite ends of town. “Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time assured her business success,” says Angelou. “From being a mobile lunch counter, she set up a stand between the two points of fiscal interest and supplied the workers’ needs for a few years” until she had the capital to build a store in the center of Stamp’s black section of town. Like many southern towns, the railroad tracks divided the towns black and white residents with whites living “on the town’s small rise (it couldn’t be called a hill), while black lived in what had been known since slavery as ‘the Quarters.’” Her grandmother’s store served as the center of activity and good food in the town’s black community. Below is a southern cornbread meat pie recipe that can be made for traditional dinners or vegans in mind.

Chicken Cornbread Pie
Ingredients
2 cups chopped, cooked chicken (or vegan substitute)
1 cup cooked lima beans
1 cup cooked corn
1/2 cup cooked green peas
1/2 cup chopped and sauteed celery
1/4 cup sauteed onions
1 cup of cream of chicken soup (or vegan substitute)
season filling mix with bay leaves, thyme, garlic powder, cumin, and salt and pepper to taste
2 cups of Cornbread Mix (make a cornmeal mix from scratch for best results or go with a box of Jiffy Cornbread Mix)
2/3 cup milk (or soy milk)

Method 
Combine chicken, beans, veggies, soup, and seasoning; mix well. Pour into a greased 8-inch square baking pan. Combine cornbread mix and milk in a small bowl; stir until smooth. Pour over chicken mixture in baking dish. Bake at 375 for 40 minutes or until golden brown. Serve with desired toppings. Serves 6

Tillie’s Chicken Shack of Harlem

Southern Corn spoon bread, recipe below

As part of my series on corn I want to took about Tille's Chicken Shack of Harlem. I learned about Teenager Tillie Eripp, a migrant from Tampa, Florida, while doing research in the New York City Municipal archives for my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures. She first migrated to Philadelphia where she suffered desperately from loneliness. “Soon, through the help of a friend, she secured a job as a cook in a boarding house, where she remained for several years,” wrote the WPA’s Sarah Chavez. She migrated from Philadelphia to New York in 1928, just before the Great Depression started. Her first job in the city was operating a concession stand selling fried chicken at Harry Hansbury’s speakeasy. Increasing demand for her chicken along with some savings led her to move to a storefront space next to the speakeasy, where she ran Tillie’s Chicken Shack. Eripp struggled in getting the business off the ground, depending entirely on inexperienced help. “Once the success of their venture was assured she added to her menu, occasionally serving collard greens, pig tails, black-eyed peas, yams and hogshead,” wrote Chavez. In 1932 she moved to Harlem's famed Jungle Alley located on West 133rd street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues where she opened the Chicken Shack at 237 Lenox Avenue and 121st Street. Jungle Alley contained a number of African American owned clubs that also attracted white musicians and patrons who came to learn more about jazz music and enjoy good food thereafter. The Chicken Shack served hot biscuits and coffee with its fried chicken dinners, “and each customer was permitted as many biscuits as he or she desired.” Later she added spoon corn bread, a variety of vegetables, and salads to the menu. One source claims her place was a favorite eatery of Marcus Garvey. Here is a related corn recipe from the Tillie's Chicken.

Here’s a spoon bread recipe: http://southernfood.about.com/od/spoonbreadrecipes/r/bl30106v.htm

Corn series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=corn+series

View episode one of Appetite City, Soul Food http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycmg/nyctvod/html/home/appt101.html

Corn Series: Hoe Cakes

Corn hoe cakes, recipes below  (photo courtesy of http://www.yummo.ca/)

Born in 1902, Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and several other Midwestern communities at the turn of the century. In his autobiography he talks about his aunt and uncle Reed who kept a family garden stocked with among other items collard greens, peas, corn, and apples. Hughes recalled that his aunt cooked wonderful “greens with corn dumplings” along with “fresh peas and young onions right out of the garden,” he says. “There were hoe-cake, and sorghum molasses, and apple dumplings with butter sauce.” Historically, enslaved African field hands received little in the way of cooking utensils from their European masters. Thus out of necessity they made hoecakes by baking a corn meal batter over hot cinders on the blade of a long handled hoe they used in the field. West and Central African farmers used the long handled hoe in their fields and introduced it to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. Baking corn on the hoe is a facsimile of how African women in Angola and São Tomé had baked corn bread wrapped in banana leaves in the cinders of fires.

Hoe cake recipe: http://www.yummo.ca/2010/05/may-9th-hoe-cakes-and-js-killer.html

Vegan hoe cake recipe: http://veganwhistlestop.blogspot.com/2010/04/vegan-buttermilk-hoe-cakes.html

Corn and the Civil War

Corn Meal Grilled Cush Cakes, recipe and other links below 

As part of my series on corn I want to talk about the most well known dish during lean times on the Civil War battle field. Confederate forces called it cush. Sometimes spelled cush, it consisted of corn meal and bacon grease with many variations and it looks and taste allot like bacon flavored polenta. A shortage of cooking utensils represented the greatest challenge cooks faced on the battle field thus leading to production of simple dishes like cush. Seldom did soldiers have access to mixing bowls, kettles, pans, and or skillets. On occasion a company might have a cast iron frying pan on hand that they took turns both using and hauling on long treks. Some made cooking utensils from the halves of captured canteens. Others mixed ingredients in turtle shells, calabashes, shirt tails and other surfaces. Some cooked bread dough wrapped around a ramrod of a rifle over a fire. We know that others also wrapped corn based dough with other ingredients in a corn shuck and cooked it in the ashes of a fire like tamales. And as you can imagine meat and fish was frequently barbecued, wild game like square, possum, or rabbit on the points of sharp sticks, and soldiers also roasted foods on top of flat slabs of rocks placed on top of hot coals.

Cush/coush recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/coush-coush-recipe/index.html

How to cook with rocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayKMitUKz-g&feature=related

Corn Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=corn+series

Corn Series: Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, Mexico 1692

Mexican Corn  tamales, recipes below

The 1692 diary entrée of fourteen year old Mariana Calderón y Oliveira provides important insights about cooking and eating in colonial Mexico. Elite families like Mariana’s generally used Indian, Spanish commoners and casta (people of mixed heritage including folks with African roots) wage laborers as family cooks. In the 1690s, cooks in Tlaquepaque prepared various types of corn tamales. At first Indians loathed the pork fat that Iberians enjoyed so much; later they incorporated them into their cuisine when they learned that using them in corn tamale batter improved the tamale’s texture. Typically they served these tamales with chilly salsa too hot for the average new comer from Spain. But the children of the first Iberian settlers such as Mariana grew accustomed to eating foods like corn tamales served with spicy hot salsa. Here are some tamale recipes:


Various meat tamale recipes: http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Recipes/List/Mexican-Tamales-Recipes-682.aspx


Vegetarian tamale recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/vegetarian_banana_leaf_tamales/

Corn Series: Brazilian Dessert

Curau or Brazilian corn pudding, recipe below

“Food must also be considered among the major recreations of Bahía,” says Vera Kelsey about Brazil’s most African influenced region where Yoruba culture from West Africa is clearly seen in the region's music and food. A trained sociologist and writer, Kelsey (1891-1961) traveled extensively in Central and South America in the 1940s and published several books on Brazil (her papers are archived at the North Dakota State University library). “And here particularly are served the rich dishes imported long ago from Portugal’s cuisine, and many more of African origin,” Kelsey writes. In the first chapter of my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents I talk about how the Portuguese introduced American corn to Africa in the sixteenth century and thereafter Africans adapted it to their fields and kitchens. You can get corn at great price at this time of the year in the north and south east, so here is a recipe for Brazilian Fresh Corn Pudding below.

Curau/ Brazilian Fresh Corn Pudding:

Ingredients

10 medium size ears, cleaned and washed
2 quarts of milk or soy milk
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1 pinch of salt
1 cup of coconut milk
2 tbsp of butter or vegan margarine
cinnamon to taste

Method

Grate the corn ears inside a large glass bowl, using a cheese grater. Make sure you get as much as you can off of each ear and put them aside. Mix the milk with the grated corn. Dip each ear into the milk and use a paring knife to squeeze out as much of the corn starch as you can from them. Use a strainer to separate the liquid from the grated corn. In a large, heavy saucepan add the sugar to the liquid and start cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly until it starts to thicken. Add the coconut milk. Continue to cook, stirring, and test the cream by dropping a 1/2 teaspoonful onto a plate. When it cools it should have the consistency of Jello. Stir in the margarine, mix well. Pour onto a decorative pie server. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Cool or refrigerate before serving.

Link for the original Curau/Brazilian corn pudding recipe: http://www.maria-brazil.org/brazilian_corn_recipes.htm

Gladys Knight’s on Her Aunt Velma's Corn Off the Cob

Corn off the cob, recipe below

Started a series this month on corn as part of my food and history blog. In writing my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/excerpt, I read a lot of autobiographies including Gladys Knight’s. We call Aretha Franklin the Queen of Soul, James Brown the God Father of Soul, but many also call Knight as the Empress of Soul. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1944, Knight made her mark as the featured singer in the Motown group Gladys Knight & the Pips and later as a solo artist. But few know that Knight is also a serious foodie (Her son is the owner of the Atlanta based restaurant franchise with her name on it, Gladys Knight & Ron Winans’ Chicken & Waffles. “I’m not going to come out and claim that the Knight family of Atlanta, Georgia, actually invented soul-food cooking,” says Knight, “but we certainly played a role in refining it into a fine art.” She goes on to say, “my aunt Velma made a corn off the cob with bacon and onions and peppers that was known to make grown people smile in their sleep for a week after they’d eaten.” Here is a user friendly hybrid corn off the cob recipe for the traditionalist and vegan.

Corn off the cob recipe

Ingredients
8 ears very fresh corn
3 tablespoons unsalted butter (vegan substitute)
½ cup of chopped onions
½ cup of chopped red and green peppers
6 slices of cooked bacon or bacon substitute
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method
Using a sharp knife, cut the kernels off the corn into a large bowl. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the corn, onions, peppers, and bacon. Season with salt and plenty of pepper and cook for three minutes, stirring frequently with a spatula. Serve immediately. Makes 4 servings. Serve it up with some fresh made butter milk biscuits with a side of warm butter and molasses for sopping.

The Series Appetite City premieres on cable channel NYC Media on 8/11 at 8:30 pm. I appear in the first show in the episode “Soul Food.” For those who don’t get the channel, you can watch the show on-line at:   www.nyc.gov/media   go to the V.O.D. player and look up Appetite City.   The show will be uploaded the day after the broadcast premiere.

Corn Series: Corn Brewed Beverages in the Andean World Part 2

Chicha (photo courtesy of https://sites.google.com/site/strongwatersthebook/) recipes below

This is part two of a two part post on chicha that I started yesterday. It’s part of a series on corn I am doing this month with the corn harvest underway in many parts of the world. As I mentioned yesterday, chicha; a 1-12% alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn which had two primary roles in Andean society. Like wine in the Christian communion, the Inca used chicha as part of their religious ceremonies. Andeans also used chicha as part of the mita system in which commoners provided the ruling oligarchy with mandatory labor to the state for the construction of infrastructure, buildings, and agricultural work for about two months per year outside of their home villages. In exchange the state provided workers with a reciprocal amount of chicha.  Employers also used chicha as payment for labor done outside of the mita system.  A similar practice occurred in colonial British America and after independence where laborers regularly negotiated their wages in beer. Similarly, in the Caribbean British soldiers received rum as part of their rations. In short, in the pre-Hispanic Andean world chicha served as the common currency that laborers happily accepted. But not all chicha tasted the same. Elites with access to higher quality ingredients and brewing techniques paid laborers with a better tasting chicha. In the final analysis chicha remained essential to the smooth operation of Andean societies serving as sanitary beverage, source of nutrition, had a religious role, kept the mita system going, and functioned as a currency of exchange.

Corn series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=corn+series

Andean soup recipe: http://laylita.com/recipes/2008/06/04/fava-bean-soup/

Corn Series: Corn Brewed Beverages in the Andean World

Chicha (Photo courtesy of http://songoftheopenroads.blogspot.com/) recipes below

The pre-Hispanic culture of the Inca was heavily influenced by what its people consumed, specifically by a brewed beverage known as chicha; a 1-12% alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn. The drink was vital to the daily life in the Andean region.  Much of what is known about chicha comes from recent anthropological work.  The state hand-picked a group of women from elite sectors of society to brew chicha. They became known as the aclla and lived in the same building where they worked.   The state regulated nearly all aspects of the production, distribution, and taxation of chicha. Men known as chicheros also made chicha which they did independent of the state as a entrepreneurial profession. A high demand existed for chicha because it tasted good and proved much cleanlier and healthier than most water supplies. Most used it as a daily beverage to compliment the food they served or drank it alone for it nutritional value. Men and women and children 14 or over commonly drank three cups of chicha every day. Chicha came in different varieties depending on one’s brewing technique, choice of corn, aging, and flavor additives. For instance we know that some added berries, sugar, and or, lemon to their chicha brew.  More on chicha tomorrow.

Andean recipes:

Olluquito con Charqui: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/03/culinary-look-at-women-in-history_29.html

Aji de Gallina/Peruvian spicy creamed chicken: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/09/hispanic-history-month-and-foodways_30.html

Corn series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=corn+series

Corn, Chocolate, and Cassava Cake

Corn, Chocolate, and Cassava cake, recipe below

As part of my series on corn, let's go back to its native roots. Amerindians ate so much corn in various ways that the some of the first Europeans who came in contact with them in the Americas called them the people of corn. Corn and chocolate are plants native to the Americas and after 1492 Europeans introduced them to Africa. In northern Angola and the western Congo, corn became a food complement that proved easier to grow and cultivate than indigenous crops (such as sorghum, millet, teff, and couscous) during environmental catastrophes like locusts and flooding. By the 1600s, one traveler observed women in the Congo making bread from corn and other plants. Similarly women on the coast of Guinea accumulated capital selling corn bread to Portuguese slave traders in local markets. After they arrived in the Americas African women continued to make and sell bread made from corn as did Native American women. People of all sectors (Iberians, Indians, Africans, and castas (mixed folk) of colonial Colombia, South America delighted in corn and chocolate. As a result Afro Colombian women in Cartagena did a brisk business as street venders hawking ready to drink chocolate beverages and a popular corn, chocolate, and cassava cake. These fashionable curbside beverages and street food illustrate the culinary syncretism that emerged at the intersection of African, Indian, and Iberian influences. Here is a recipe for a great corn, chocolate, and cassava cake:

Corn, chocolate, and cassava cake recipe: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/17/chocolate-cassava-cake

Corn series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=corn+series

Series on Corn

Roasted Corn Vender, Historic District Mexico City

I’ve noted while doing grocery shopping that allot of places have corn on sale. I wanted to take advantage of the season and do a series of post on corn foodways (the history and culture surrounding how and why we prepare and consume corn). Most of the post will have related recipes including today's story on Cuba.  In the port of Havana, Cuba, large-scale sugar planters purchased the lion share of most lots of slaves. Planters in Cuba typically distributed niggardly allotments of yucca, yams, and plantains on a weekly or monthly basis. “When plantains are scarce” writes traveler Mary Gardner Lowell “corn is substituted & so the reverse.” In addition to their fieldwork, slaves in Cuba received time and space to work their subsistence gardens. Former slave Esteban Montejo recalled his days in captivity in Cuba, “it was the small gardens that saved many slaves. They provided them real nourishment. Almost all slaves had their conucos [gardens].” He writes: “They were little strips of dirt for gardening. They were real close to the barracoons, almost right in back. They grew everything there: sweet potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans, like limas, limes, yucca, and peanuts.” 

Related links: http://www.tasteofcuba.com/