Back to School Series: Donuts at CHHS

Ossining Italian Bakery above, the bakery changed management and the quality is not the same


Doing post on what it’s meant historically to return to school after a long summer break. Over the next couple of day I’m going to reflect on my experience growing up in a small town in the Hudson Valley in a suburb of New York City. When you entered Croton-Harmon High School (CHHS) in the 1970s, you quickly learned the school foodways (eating traditions and culture as the evolve over time). Westchester as a reach Italian culinary heritage which can be tasted in many ways, but one of the best at my high school was eating delightful Ossining Italian Bakery donuts and drinking a carton of milk in the cafeteria. As a fund raiser, each senior class at CHHS would sell donuts and milk in the school cafeteria. the smell of freshly baked and still warm donuts especially the glazed and jelly donuts sprinkled with a sugar and cinnamon ones. The smell of the donuts permeated the first floor of the building and that mouth-watering smell remains one of my most vivid back to school memories. The bakery truck delivered the donuts every school morning from Ossining, the next village southeast of Croton on the banks of the Hudson River. On a cool Hudson Valley morning, eating one of those warm donuts for a quarter with a carton of cold milk for the same price tasted like heaven on earth.


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

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/

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

Southern Fried Chicken, recipes below

I am doing a series of post on lunch as part of a back to school series. The Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) can best be described as a real foodie from Jacksonville, Florida. Johnson, who spoke fluent Spanish, attended prestigious Atlanta University (a Historical Black College and University (HBCU)) in Atlanta, Georgia at age sixteen graduating in 1894. There is  a wonderful story of Johnson and a Cuban classmate named Ricardo eating the lunch his mother prepared for them on the Jim Crow train they took to Atlanta to start their first year of college. In his book, Forging Diasporas, Historian Frank Guridy tell us that starting at the turn of the century, hundreds of Afro-Hispanic parents from the Caribbean and Central and South America sent their children to HBCUs to attend school because of the lack of educational opportunities in their homelands.  “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

On the Occasion of Michael Jackson's Birthday: 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 Understand Freedom Summer and Fannie Lou Hammer

Fannie Lou Hammer, Victoria Jackson, and Annie Devine

Been doing a series of post on the movie The Help and the incorrect revision of history it leaves in the minds of movie goers. My point has been to provide the historical context that the movie and the book leaves out. The movie is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964, just one year after the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, one of the most important events in the Civil rights movement took place in Mississippi—Freedom Summer—a grass roots voter registration campaigns in Mississippi focused on African Americans in the state. Robert (Bob) Moses orchestrated the movement. But in contrast to the movie The Help which shows black women as pawns, African American women Fannie Lou Hammer played an important leadership role at the local level in McComb, Mississippi where Freedom Summer began. The goal of Freedom Summer was to combat African American disenfranchisement and the barring of blacks from participating in the state Democratic Party and to defeat the white racist members of the regular Democratic Party. The Voter registration drive proved extremely difficult because of the intense violence and intimidation tactics African Americans faced in Mississippi. Those who attempted to register to vote often lost their jobs and experienced physical violence and or police harassment. Black and white college students from northern institutions volunteers during Freedom Summer and white racist murdered three of them:  Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Despite the dangers volunteers registered thousands of new black voters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 and ran black candidates for a third party called the Mississippi Democratic Party; Hammer became one the party's candidates in the Delta. Related to yesterday’s post, the story goes that Juan “Big John” Mora the owner of the Big Apple Inn who migrated to Jackson from Mexico City started off as an entrepreneur selling tamales out of a hot tamale cart on Farish Street. One little known foodways tradition in the Mississippi Delta is African American entrepreneurs who sell tamales for a living. Below find a tamale recipe and a link to an interesting documentary on Scott’s Hot Tamale stand in Greenville, Mississippi.

Hear Fannie Lou at 1964 National Democratic Party Convention [8:11]  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html


Mississippi delta tamale recipe: http://www.tamaletrail.com/recipe_howto.shtml

Film Rolling Tamales on MLK [5:00]: http://southernfoodways.org/documentary/film/e_scott.html

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/

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

Women's Political Caucus: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5035704

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

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

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. 

Women's Political Caucus: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5035704

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

Tuskegee stories and related recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Tuskegee+

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

Let Me Help You Get More Complex Look at The South

Photo of 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.

Here are related recipes:

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

Help The Help: Wages, Resistance, and Domestic Workers

African women and men at a community Brunswick stew event in the south, recipes below

Yes it’s true that the majority of African-American women working as domestics in the Jim Crow south earned shamefully low wages as portrayed in the movie The Help which is based on a best selling work of fiction published in 2009. But it’s also true that many domestics took action to improve their compensation such as the practice of toting. As one historian describes, “it was not at all unusual for them to ‘tote,’ that is, to bring leftovers from their employer’s house home with them. When these women planned the meals, as they often did, the leftovers might be of good quality and considerable quantity.” In Depression era Savannah, Georgia Lorena Hickok, a white Midwesterner who worked for FDR’s administration, observed, “if you hire a cook down here, that means you take on the job of feeding, not only the cook, but her whole family.” Because, before they go home, they “clean out your ice box every night.” White patrons had become so accustomed to this that they did their shopping and “marketing with that in mind. It’s considered just as regular as tipping a waitress in Childs’ [restaurant] in New York.” For more on African American lives and food during the depression see the chapter The Beans and Greens of Necessity in my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy. Let me also recommend my colleague Tera Hunter’s award winning book on black women in the south including domestic servants below.

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

Traditional Brunswick stew recipe: http://belleofthekitchen.blogspot.com/2010/10/dusting-off-recipesand-brunswick-stew.html

Vegan Brunswick stew recipe: http://veganthyme.blogspot.com/2009/12/vegan-brunswick-stew-topped-with-spelt.html

White Employers, Black Domestics, and Infrapolitics

90 year old Ella Gold Baker July 2005, recipe below

I am doing a series of post in response to the movie The Help. I found the movie’s portrayal of Jim Crow and white and black southerners lacking in complexity as compared to research I had done. 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 and some whites 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 food. Some recalled how 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

Race, Class, Food and the Movie the Help

18th-century servant preparing a meal, recipes below

My wife and I went to see the new movie the Help which is creating a allot of discussions. We both left the movie feeling a little ambiguous about what we saw. It's so rare to see black folks getting leading parts in Hollywood so we were happy about that. As foodie I loved the food scenes which made my mouth water. However, the one dimensional  betrayal of white women and the portrayal of black women as people with no agency to resist was disturbing. In addition the movie made Jim Crow Mississippi look far less violent than it was and the city's black community much more homogeneous than it was. Jackson had a historically black college with black PhDs, lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs who lived far better than the black characters in the movie. Today I am going to start a series of post that talk about domestic servants, Jim Crow, black women's resistant to Jim Crow and the complexity of black and whites and the relationships between them in the South. Two often Northerners see a movie like the Help and stereotype southerners as the root of this country's race problem. However, poor working conditions, violence and sexual assaults against domestics in the north has a long and sorted history as well. Not to mention defacto Jim Crow has existed north of the Mason Dixon line for a long time. I live in the metro Boston and domestic here meant Irish women from the early nineteenth century to the time of the great migration of blacks from the south starting around World War I. Irish women  migrated to this region where they worked in textile mills but they preferred jobs as cooks for upper class white families. Why, because North American white women considered domestic work beneath them creating a labor shortage. As result market forces gave Irish domestic workers options; when they did not like the terms of a contract they quit and took jobs with higher wages and better conditions of service. Such conditions and labor shortages did not exist for black women in the South thus their wages remained low and their treatment disrespectful in most cases. In contrast many of the Irish women who started as domestics were able to save enough money to become entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry. Today, many women from different parts of the Caribbean, Latin America, and particularly Brazil  are the cooks for upper class white and black families here in metro Boston. As in the south of the 1950s and 60s, the current recession and flooded labor market has kept wages low for them too.  I wonder what these women would say about their employers if I conducted oral histories about their work experience? 

'The Help' Draws Audiences, And Ire: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=139755308&m=139755301

Tomato Series: Ropa Vieja

Ropa vieja, recipes below

In the midst of a series on tomatoes. Today I want to talk about the Spanish speaking Caribbean. The Spanish first arrived in the Caribbean thus it seemed only logical to start there with my culinary musings. Today I am talking about the Caribbean dish ropa vieja or old clothes. This dish is often associated with Cuba but enslaved Africans in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico all made it from discarded scraps of meat that elites in expensive homes discarded after elaborate meals. They would add vegetables like tomatoes grown in gardens around their slave quarters to the scraps and that's how ropa vieja was born. This dish fits my working definition of soul food that I discuss in my book Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy—a fabulous-tasting dish made from simple, inexpensive ingredients including tomatoes. It is also food enjoyed by folk, whom it reminds of their rural and African roots and cultures, as well as adaptations to conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. The ropa vieja is sautéed shredded beef covered with a rich tomato based sauce seasoned with spices and vegetables such as onion, bell pepper, garlic, cumin, and cilantro. Here are two recipes for ropa vieja:

Traditional ropa vieja recipe: http://inatinykitchen.blogspot.com/2006/11/ropa-vieja.html

Vegan ropa vieja recipe: http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=27125

Tomato Series: Cookery and the Colombian exchange

Shrimp, Okra, and Tomato Sauté recipe below 

 

As part of this week’s series on tomatoes, we travel to New Orleans today. Tomatoes originated in Central America. Iberians introduced them to Europe and Africa in the early of the sixteenth century as part of the Colombian exchange. Europeans first used them ornamental purposes while Africans cooks gradually exhibited a love for using them for seasoning sauces, stews, and soups. It was not until later that Europeans started cooking with them because they believed tomatoes would poison them. During the Atlantic slave trade Europeans introduced tomato plants to Louisiana which it quickly became a staple in local cookery in and around New Orleans. As a port city, New Orleans saw a steady of influx of enslaved Africans imported directly from West and Central Africa as well as indirectly from the Caribbean and the Mississippi Delta.  Enslaved Africans grew tomatoes in their subsistence gardens along with turnips, cabbage, eggplant, cucumbers, onion, garlic, and hot peppers as a supplement to their diet and all of which they had been cultivated in West and Central Africa. Here is a New Orleans shrimp, okra, and tomato Sauté recipe in which you can make use of your garden tomatoes. 

 

Shrimp, Okra, and Tomato Sauté Recipe:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/New-Orleans-Shrimp-Okra-and-Tomato-Saute-242114

Tomato Series: Nina Simone and North Carolina During the Depression

Tomato bread pudding, recipe below

Faculty and staff here at Babson College started a garden just as the spring semester came to an end. Now we have among many other produce, lots of tomatoes! It's that time of the harvest season when gardeners start unloading tomatoes on family and friends because they are just too many for one family to eat. This is a good problem considering just how expensive tomatoes are in the grocery store and the fact that the average massed produced grocery store tomato doesn't hold a candle to a garden grown one. This dilemma inspired me to launch a Tomato series for a couple of days. What will follow over the next couple of days are tomato laden stories rich in history and recipes for carnivores and vegans. Please do share your tomato stories from times gone by and or related recipes. Today's story is set in the Great Depression which seems appropriate for what many folks are going through today.  In 1933 the Federal National Relief Agency (NRA) chose Tyron, North Carolina for one of its surplus food distribution program area depots. Many survived the Depression on government relief rolls and jobs with the NRA. Singer and song writer Nina Simone’s father and other men in Tyron received NRA truck-driving jobs. “Not only did the men at the depot get given a little extra food to take home, but the drivers built up a network of people who would trade food among themselves,” Simone recalls. Families would trade what they raised in excess from their gardens and the surplus food they received on the job. Drivers traded leftover “collard greens, string beans, tomatoes and sometimes eggs” with drivers who had “more sugar or flour, say, than they needed.” Here a recipe I really like for tomato bread pudding:

Tomato bread pudding recipe: http://prouditaliancook.blogspot.com/2009/09/holding-on-to-summer-with-tomato-bread.html