Gourds and Tubers Series: Part 1 Nina Simon and The Great Depression

With both a recession and the fall of the year here both have inspired me to do a series on gourds and tubers. If one is going to eat locally and eat what’s in season, you’d need to bone up on gourds and tuber like the many variety of squash, sweet potatoes, yams, and potatoes. Gourds and tubers are generally inexpensive and they can be prepared many different ways. During the Great Depression of the 1930s and early 1940s, families adapted their cooking to both lean times and the short periods of feasting that followed the arrival of state aid, bartered items, and the harvest from a garden. African American singer, composer, and civil rights activist Nina Simone (1933-2003) was born and raised in Tyron, North Carolina. She recalled that as a child her family transformed a big garden into “a huge garden and finally a little farm. We had . . . Rows and rows of string beans, collard greens, tomatoes, corn and squash."  Below I provide some great squash and zucchini recipes to go with this historical piece. The first one for zucchini muffins is one I really enjoy making and eating and my eight and six year old love them.

Squash and Zucchini recipes:

http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/zucchini_muffins/

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2008/08/sunny-summer-squash-soup.html

http://blog.vegcooking.com/2009/07/chilled_summer_squash_and_leek_1.php

http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/002062zucchini_with_thyme.php

Delta Food: Part 4 SNCC and Black Farmers

Group of Sharecroppers in U. S. South circa 1930s

Young tender squash on the vine, related recipe below 

I have been down in the Mississippi Delta doing field work, writing, and attending the annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium at Old Miss entitled the Cultivated South. The former U. S. Department of Agriculture administrator Shirley Sherrod a native of Georgia spoke yesterday about her families history and struggle of black farmers in the South. She also talked about the circumstances around why the Departments of Agriculture Secretary forced her to resign. But I found her discussion about the little know history of SNCC's work with black farmers in the 1960s most interesting. Sherrod and her husband as SNCC organizers helped poor farmers develop and market food products that they could sell and thus become financially and politically independent. With financial independence gave the farmers the option to engage in civil rights activism. Her words reminded me of the oppressive system of tenant farming, the crop lien system, and sharecropping in the post civil war south that kept so many black farmers from owning their land outright.  

Crock pot squash recipe

Ingredients

2 pounds yellow summer squash or zucchini, thinly sliced (about 6 cups)

1/4 cup chopped onion

1/2 cup peeled shredded carrot

1 can (10 1/4 ounces) condensed cream of celery or cream of mushroom soup

1 cup vegetable broth

1/4 cup flour

1 package (6 to 8 ounces) corn bread stuffing crumbs

1/2 cup butter, melted

Season with Old bay and fresh herbs of your choice to taste

Method

In large bowl, combine squash, onion, carrot and soup. Mix vegetable broth and flour; stir into vegetables. Toss stuffing crumbs with butter and place half in slow cooker. Add vegetable mixture and top with remaining stuffing crumbs. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours.

Southern Foodways Alliance: http://southernfoodways.org/

Shirley Sherrod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk

Delta Food: Part 3 Juke Joint as Eateries

A crossroads store, bar, jook joint in the cotton plantation area of Melrose Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, 1940, related recipes below (Courtesy of the Library Congress) Click to image to enlarge

In Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta entrepreneurs operated juke joints where music played while black cooks prepared all kinds of comfort food including inexpensive cuts of pork like pig’s feet, fried chicken, biscuits, all kinds of greens, and sweet potato pie. Rural laborers who spent long days at work picketing cotton used the juke joints as places to shoot the breeze with friends, catch up on local news, drank, dance, and court. In the Mississippi Delta Juke joints also served as places where laborers ate their daily meals. In a strange reversal of Jim Crow before it’s demise white men snuck into Juke Joints unobtrusively to drink and pick up takeout orders of food and drank in brown paper bags. The grilled, smoked, and barbecued meats that came out of these places represented a continuum of the cookery that came from the slave quarters and special occasion meals during the antebellum period. Steamboat and railroad cooks brought these cooking styles with them as they migrated out of the south and they became part of the menus of working class bar and grills in places like Chicago where so many Delta went during the Great Migration. The local bar and in Chicago served as the Juke joint's double where live- music, down-home food, alcohol, and romance served important role in the lives of many blue collar workers. I’m down in Mississippi doing field work and attending a Southern Foodways Alliance symposium a Old Miss. Yesterday at breakfast in Greenwood, I heard Delta farmer Bonita Conwell of the Southern Rural Black Woman’s Initiative tell the story how she is producing sweet potatoes and selling the sweet potato tops or greens to a market in Houston that caters to West African customers who love the greens. Historically West Africans used a varied of sources to obtain their greens including the tops of tubers like yams which are indigenous to Africa and sweet potatoes introduced to Africa during the Colombian exchange. By the way, the term juke has its origins in West Africa and it means something wicked or evil.  Here are some related stories and recipes for sweet potato greens below.

Sweet potato green recipes:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2007/10/a_sweet_potato_twofer.html

 http://www.grit.com/super-side-dishes/sweet-potato-greens-recipe.aspx

Sweet potato tops salad: http://ascientistinthekitchen.net/salads/sweet-potato-kamote-tops-salad/

Stir fried sweet potato tops and shrimp: http://www.myasiankitchenny.com/2009/08/stir-fry-sweet-potato-leaves-in-sambal.html

Southern Rural Black Woman’s Initiative: http://www.srbwi.org/

Delta Food: Part 1 Molasses

Molasses flavored rice and meat stuffed bell peppers in tomato sauce, recipe below

I am down in the Mississippi Delta at Southern Foodways event. I going to do a series over the next couple of days on Delta Foodways with related recipes.  After the Civil War, access to food, particularly sweets like molasses, became an indicator of one’s social and economic status. Proletarians like tenant farmers experienced a quasi-slave-like existence in which they received food rations from large white planters. Corn bread and molasses were the only food items that tenant farmers in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana had during hard times. A 1928 Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station report on African American tenant farmers in the largely cotton producing Yazoo-Mississippi Delta provides excellent insights into molasses consumption among black farmers. Most whites and blacks ate the largest percentage of their calories in the form of sweets, particularly cane syrup. African Americans, says the report, “like molasses and eat a great deal of it especially in fall, winter, and early spring.” Most farmers also raised pigs and cultivated gardens with greens, peas, all kinds of peppers, and tomatoes. So what kind of food could one make with such ingredients? How about molasses flavored rice and meat stuffed peppers with corn bread for sopping the tomato sauce.


Molasses flavored Rice and Meat Stuffed Bell Peppers Recipe


Ingredients
1 3/4 cup water
1 cup brown basmati rice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 pound vegan or regular mild sausage
1/2 vegan ground beef or regular beef
1 16 oz can vegan or meat no bean chile
2 cups whole tomatoes
2 cups diced tomatoes
2 cups tomato sauce
1 8 oz can tomato paste
2 tablespoons or more of molasses
1 teaspoon of anise seeds
1/2 teaspoon fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon majorem
1 tablespoon sage
6 or 7 bell peppers


Method
Cook some wet rice with salt and butter, but be sure it doesn’t try out. While cooking the rice, sauté sausage and ground beef together in a skillet until brown then add chile, tomatoes, sauce and paste combining the ingredients with the meat in a crock pot on high then turn down to low after all the contents to really cooking. Then add the molasses, anise, marjorem, sage and cilantro into the crock pot and stir well and add more molasses to sweeten it if you like. Cook the stuffing in the crock pot well. Preheat oven to 325 while you are stuffing the peppers, careful because the stuffing will be hot. Place the stuffed peppers in a large (preferable glass) baking dish. Take the entire remainder of the stuffing mix and pour it over the bell peppers in the pan. Bake for about 10 minutes. Over cooking will dry out the sauce - or worse, blacken the rice.

TV series Appetite City: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycmg/nyctvod/html/home/appt101.html

Black Agricultural Workers at the Turn of the Century and Foodways

Jamaican Immigrant Emma Williams, recipes below 

In 1926, Wallace Thompson traveled by train through the United Fruit Company (UFCO) of Boston’s Costa Rica division in Port Limón on the Caribbean coast of the country. Wallace described the banana-producing region as a “Latin American Black Belt” where banana plantations and black laborers were synonymous. Black immigrants could be seen individually and in “gangs,” on plantations, in “villages,” and “every-where.” After visiting Guatemala’s banana region in the department of Izabal in the early 1930s, the radical American journalist Carlton Beals concluded similarly, “Central America is going black.” While doing research for my book Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=OPIEX001, I came across Guatemalan immigration documents that black women filled out in 1928. The documents show that large numbers of women also traveled throughout Central America in search of economic opportunity. The greatest number of these women self-identified as Jamaican, with a women from St. Lucia and Panama. These were largely single women who described themselves as domestic workers with one machinist, one seamstress, and one laundress. Emma Williams (in the photo above) was born in Jamaica in 1907, immigrated to and settled in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala where she gave birth to a daughter in 1926 and worked as a domestic. Some women started as domestic and went on to purchase land and farm as well as open boarding houses, restaurants, and cantinas. Over many years these immigrant women made an indelible mark on Guatemalan culture, particularly in the Caribbean region, where English became the lingua franca, jazz and reggae became popular forms of musical expression, and jerk chicken and meat patties became part of the local cuisine. Here are some related recipes below.

Jerked chicken recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/jerk_chicken/

Veggie patty recipe: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/jamaican-veggie-patties-recipe.html

Chicken patty video recipe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Z-7WSIi3A

Vegetarian Banana Leaf Tamales
http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/vegetarian_banana_leaf_tamales/

Black Bean and Plantain Tamale Filling
http://recipes.chef2chef.net/recipe-archive/27/147412.shtml

Related link: http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.5/br_89.html

Examing Soul Food and North Carolina Foodways

The following is a prerecorded radio interview I did on Charlotte, North Carolina National Public Radio:

We have food and music of the soul today on Charlotte Talks. First up, our monthly food show with Chef Peter Reinhart. Soul food has become as much a part of the African Diaspora and African American life as it is a set of recipes or cooking style. We'll examine soul food in all of its manifestations.
Peter Reinhart - Chef-in-Residence
Frederick Opie - Author of Hog and Hominy
James Bazzelle - Owner, Mert's Heart and Soul Restaurant

Listen now: http://www.wfae.org/wfae/19_100_0.cfm?id=4479&action=display

Listen to show extras: http://charlotteblogs.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/thursday-november-20-soul-food-charlotte-the-opera/

Food and the Mexican Revolution Series Part 2

Soldaderas during the Mexican Revolution carrying food next to the Zapatista army, circa 1914, related Mexican recipes below

Last week I did interviews around the role of food and social moments and revolutions on location at Occupy Wall Street in lower Manhattan. I argue that food is an indicator of social position, a site of community building and identity, and a juncture where different traditions can develop and impact a movement. To gage my theory, I intentionally interviewed protesters from different generations and genders and to gain greater insight into the movement. For example, many know about the men who fought in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) but what role did women play? The soldaderas or women soldiers fought in the revolution and some served as camp cooks and soldiers despite enduring hardships such as sexual harassment and or violence. Their military and culinary contributions to Pancho Villa’s Northern Army and Emiliano Zapato’s Southern Army proved important. There are a number of publications on them as soldiers but we know far less about their role in what I call feeding the revolution. The soldaderas were typically mestizas (people of mixed ethnicity) or Indian women who helped meet a basic necessity of any military campaign—food, and food shortages did plague the revolutionary forces. Soldaderas foraged for edible plants, berries, mushrooms, herbs, and insects and bartered with locals for pigs, fowl, and dairy products. In addition, they hauled the pots and pans from one battle front to the next and gathered the wood needed to cook a meal. Soldaderas set up camp and cooked legumes, meat, other items that filled the tortillas made from corn; corn they ground, shaped, and cooked. These women feed the revolution under the constant sexual harassment and violence from male soldiers who often viewed women in public at that time without guardians or chaperons as loose and or prostitutes. Below is a video photo montage on soldadera history and several Mexican recipes of the time of foods one might have prepared on the front lines. Most often cooks had limited access to ingredients and cooking equipment in a war zone.

Video of soldadera history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Nt9x3gW8U

Mushroom taco filling (Tacos de Hongos) recipe: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/dining/232mrex.html

Mexican fava bean soup recipe: http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/2135-mexican-fava-bean-soup-caldo-de-habas-vegetariano

Vegan tamale recipe: http://joyouslyalivegoesvegan.blogspot.com/2007/10/tamales.html

Nopalitos with tomatoes and onions recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/nopalitos_with_tomatoes_and_onions/

Food and the Mexican Revolution Series Part I

Chicken tortilla soup, recipes below (photo from http://www.lifesambrosia,com/)

Mexico, particularly Mexico City and the border town Ciudad Juarez, has become a much more dangerous place than Colombia in terms of narco-trafficking related violence. As they have historically done in places like Africa, U. S. based news outlets have become fixated on the drug related deaths and the destruction civil society in Mexico to the exclusion of the countries resilient people and rich culture. Many do not know that the Harlem Renaissance literary figure Langston Hughes lived in Mexico and spoke Spanish fluently. Jim Crow laws and customs in the United States influenced his father become an expatriate who lived in Toluca just south of Mexico City. This happened during the time of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1917. Rising Mexican nationalism caused many white American to flee Mexico thus providing job opening for African-American like Hughes. At the age of fourteen Langston lived with his father in Toluca and as a serious foodie, he provides wonderful descriptions of the food there particularly the “pile of steaming-hot tortillas,” that always appeared on a Mexican table. Historically neighborhoods of all class distinctions in Mexico had a tortilla vender that produced piping hot government subsidized tortillas. Mexicans eat them with all kinds of cuts of beef, pork, and fish, they make soup with them, eat soup with them, and filled them with all kinds of ingredients from sautéed mushrooms in gravy, to guacamole, to refried beans, and topped with red or green salsa Here some tortilla recipes below.

Chicken tortilla soup: http://www.lifesambrosia.com/2010/12/chicken-tortilla-soup-recipe.html

Vegan tortilla soup recipe: http://www.thirdage.com/healthy-recipes/heart-healthy-recipes-vegan-tortilla-soup

Feeding the Revolution: Food and the Continental Army

Succotash, recipe below 

After spending two days at Occupy Wall Street, I started reflecting on what I know about food and other revolutions. In particular I wanted to know about food in the American revolution, Cuban Independence movement 1868-1898, Mexican Revolution 1910-1920, and revolutionary movements in Africa and Central America in the 1960s and thereafter. Today I’ll start out with the American Revolution. The Continental Army provided rations of flour or bread, beef, vegetables, and rum to the soldiers. Soldiers also obtained food in trade with country folks and “camp traders” who followed the army. Most companies had a designated baker who collected flour and money in exchange for producing regularly allotments of soft bread and hefty profits in the process. Bread distributed as rations came most often in the form of hardtack or ship biscuits. In addition women, freemen who did not go to war, and enslaved Africans feed the ranks of the Continental Army. In addition to producing food for themselves and their customers, women, freemen, and enslaved Africans feed the American Revolution cooking for tens of thousands of soldiers. Succotash his dish that Americans incorporated from Native American cookery. 


Succotash recipe: http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/cat/2328/


Food and Occupy Wall Street:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/occupy-wall-street-growing-more-organized/2011/10/08/gIQAHbySVL_video.html

Food and Revolutionary Movements: The Black Panthers

Black Panther breakfast program started in 1968 in San Francisco (Photo courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)

Did some interviews down at Occupy Wall Street last night and day, boy the hawk was out—southern slang for—crazy windy cold. I've been collecting materials for a book on the role of food in social movements. Despite what skeptics and opponents say, there is a very organized social movement going on that I would argue started with large numbers of unemployed students in various parts of Spain and then took root in lower Manhattan. What I saw can best be described as a very organized group of demonstrators with a movement that has a “Peoples kitchen” at its core and feeds thousands of people for free three or more times a day.  Food and social movements have a long history which I will discuss in the coming days.   During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers first launched organizing against police brutality and community empowerment efforts in poor African American neighborhoods in Oakland, California. As with the current movement, the media condemned the Panthers as crazy unemployed teenagers with no clear message. The Panthers developed a ten point platform for those cared to listen and understand the points guided their movement: WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY. The Panthers Founder Huey Newton developed a free breakfast program for poor children as part of the Panthers’ many survival programs which provided community service in low income neighborhoods. In 1969 Newton said, “The Free Breakfast for School Children is about to cover the country and be initiated in every chapter and branch of tile Black Panther Party. This program was created because the Black Panther Party understands that our children need a nourishing breakfast every morning so that they can learn.” He went on to say, “It is a beautiful sight to see our children eat in the mornings after remembering the times when our stomachs were not full, and even the teachers in the schools say that there is a great improvement in the academic skills of the children that do get the breakfast. At one time there were children that passed out in class from hunger, or had to be sent home for something to eat. But our children shall be fed, and the Black Panther Party will not let the malady of hunger keep our children down any longer.

Charlie "Boogaloo" and Informal Eateries in Brooklyn

Panamanian Patties, this and other recipes below 

A fascinating contrast to the situation in the Tarrytowns is the relationships that developed between African Americans and Afro-Panamanians at informal eateries in Brooklyn. In the 1960s, family dinners were a “big deal” in Brooklyn, recalls George Priestly, an Afro-Panamanian sociologist who conducted about 60 interviews with Panamanian immigrants to the United States, was born in 1941 and raised in a working-class community in Panama City, Panama. But there were also African American and Afro-Panamanian women who would cook out of their own homes, throwing “paid parties” to earn rent money. Priestly says that as newcomers to New York, Afro-Panamanian emigrants loved paid parties because they “enlarged [their] contact with other folk” who showed them the ropes. The concept of going from one house to another eating and partying was “something we learned from African Americans,” Priestly remembers. He used to attend paid parties with an Afro-Panamanian friend nicknamed Charlie Boogaloo, who knew all of the best spots and all of the people that ran them. “When you went with Charlie, you could go in and eat or drink and then split,” Priestly says. “He would know about seven different places and we would just go from house to house paying a couple of dollars, eating, and then go back to our party or stay there.” Different house parties had different kinds of food. African American homes usually served up southern food. At an Afro-Panamanian home, there would be West Indian meat patties and rice and peas, chicken, fried plantains, potato salad, and Central American tamales.

Panamanian patties recipe:http://spotlight.dancehallkitchen.com/2010/09/22/pastelillos-de-carne-recipe-beef-patties/

Veggie patties recipe: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/jamaican-veggie-patties-recipe.html

Black and Latino relations series with additional recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Black+and+Latino+relations+

New York's Cuban Diaspora and Bodegas as Eateries

Pisto manchego, this and other recipes below 

The book I am now completing is on  Black Latino Relations in New York 1959 to 1989 (forthcoming Columbia University Press). Throughout the book I discuss collaborations between recently arrived Southern born blacks, black Caribbeans, and migrants from the Spanish speaking Caribbean as well as mainland Latin America. As a professor of history and foodways, I intentionally seasoned the text with stories about the importance of food in building relationships and community. I gathered lots of rich oral histories on the Tarrytowns where my father grew up and where I lived between 2003 and 2010. In addition to restaurants and luncheonettes, Latin Americans had their own Bodegas in the Tarrytowns. There were Bodegas on Cortland Street, which by the late 1950s had become the center of the Puerto Rican community. Hispanic bodegas were small shops where drinks and food were sold for consumption on or off the premises. By the 1970s, there was the Cuban–owned bodegas in Tarrytown too. Guayos Cubans Jorge Pozas and Juan González ran bodegas on Main Street. Urban centers in Cuba had Bodegas all over the place and both black and white Cubans frequented them. Bodegas served as a breakfast destination for poorer residents who could not afford to eat at more expensive cafes. Speaking about Cuban bodegas in 1940s Havana, Hugh Bradley writes, “the penny prices ensured a brisk trade. Laborers of whatever coloring sat side by side in them at breakfast time, drinking red wine, native rum, or delicious coffee, while partaking of the fried fish and the savory garlic stews prepared on the charcoal fire at the back of the room.” In Cuba bodegas were multi-ethnic spaces but in the Tarrytowns language barriers inhibited the formation of friendships in most of the bodegas between Spanish-speaking immigrants and English-speaking African Americans. Here is a recipe for pisto manchego a popular ratatouille dish in Cuba and Spain.

Pisto manchego recipe: http://www.spainontheroadagain.com/recipe_pistomanchego.shtml

Black and Latino relations series with additional recipes: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Black+and+Latino+relations+

El Jaravi in Tarrytown, New York and Dominican Foodways

Arroz con pollo (rice and chicken) with fried plantains, black bean soup and avocado slices on the side

In contrast to African Americans in the Tarrytowns, Latin Americans had their own eateries. In the 1970s, there was the Cuban–owned Corona’s Luncheonette (already discussed) and Renaldo Barrios’s Nite and Day Delicatessen. Both of these Cuban eateries were located on Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown, not far from the old General Motors plant that closed in the early 1990s. In Tarrytown, Guayos Cubans Jorge Pozas and Juan González ran the La Via, a bar and restaurant on Orchard Street, and Pozas (and later Orestes Suarez) ran a luncheonette called the Lucky Seven on Main Street in Tarrytown. Cuban men milled around the Lucky Seven smoking, sipping café pico (a traditional Cuban coffee), eating plantain soup, yellow rice, black beans, and ropa vieja (shredded beef), and “discussing in Spanish the burning issues of the day.” Orestes Suarez explains, “This is the way of life in the old country . . . when work is done it is the custom to gather around and talk [in Spanish].” In the 1970s there were Dominican restaurants as well. After the death of the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, and the end of his fame plantain curtain that kept citizens form living the country, large numbers of Dominican started migrating to metropolitan New York. It’s clear who the first families were in the Tarrytowns but today they are one of the largest immigrant groups, particularly in North Tarrytown where they operate a number of barbershops, bodegas, and restaurants. In the 1970s North Tarrytown had one Dominican restaurant at 109 Beekman Avenue called El Jaravi. Its signature dishes included octopus salad, arroz con pollo (rice and chicken), and arroz con camarones (rice and shrimp characteristically seasoned with cilantro, in addition to other herbs and spices). Here is a recipe for Dominican arroz con pollo (rice and chicken) below.

Arroz con pollo (rice and chicken) recipe: http://www.5dollardinners.com/2010/09/arroz-con-pollo-southern-comfort-food.html

Vegetarian Arroz con pollo recipe: http://www.suite101.com/content/vegan-arroz-con-pollo-recipe-a190554

More on Dominican foodways: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2011/03/culinary-celebration-of-womens-history_05.html


Black and Latino relations series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Black+and+Latino+relations+

Black Churches As Eateries

Smothered cabbage, mace and cheese, ribs, and corn bred, this and other recipes below

Started a series on Black and Latino relations based on my current book project. Just as Hispanics and African Americans tended to enjoy separate entertainment in the Tarrytowns (with the exception of General Motors workers in certain contexts-see yesterday's post), they also frequented separate eateries. Oral histories revealed there were no black-owned-and-operated restaurants or luncheonettes in the Tarrytowns. (In fact, there are none today.) The only African Americans eateries were the bar and grills in town—Club Six, the Upper Class Men, the Wonderful Bar, and De Carlo’s. For religious African Americans, the black churches in the villages also served as both spiritual filling stations and, to some extent, eateries. Northern urban centers in villages like the Tarrytowns transformed the religious traditions of the rural South, but southern migrants did not abandon their tradition of church membership. By 1945, the Tarrytowns had about 3 African-American churches in the black enclave that developed on the West side of Broadway. Throughout Westchester County Broadway served as the ethnic border that separated Latino and Black residents (and poor whites, many of them Italian immigrants) from the towns upper class white residents. In addition to church membership, southern migrants brought with them a tradition of important yearly church programs and free food. The most likely occasions to include free food were on special occasions such asThanksgiving, Christmas, and Watch Night services (which I will discuss at this end of this month). As a child I attended allot of these free food church events at the Shallow Baptist Church in Tarrytown. Here is recipe for smothered cabbage that goes well with this story.

Smothered cabbage recipe: http://www1.essence.com/recipes/dinner/info/smotheredcabbagepot

Vegan Smothered cabbage recipe: http://www.all-creatures.org/mhvs/recipes-

Black and Latino relations series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Black+and+Latino+relations+

Corona’s Luncheonette: Space and Black and Latino Relations in New York

Cuban sandwich, recipes below

My current book project is on Black and Latino Relations in New York 1959 to 1989. In the process of doing research over the past four years, I've come across some very interesting sources on the importance of space and race relations particularly union halls and eateries. In the Tarrytowns in Westchester County, Spanish speaking immigrants and African Americans in the 1960s largely stuck together in their own bars and eateries. The exception to this pattern of social segregation occurred among General Motors (GM) workers, who belonged to a comfortable shared subgroup as fellow workers and union members. Corona’s Luncheonette on Beekman Avenue, one block from the GM plant in North Tarrytown (now called Sleepy Hollow), served as an important space where black and Latino GM workers socialized five or more days a week over good Cuban fritas (Cuban-style hamburgers), Cuban empanadas (a patty filled with ground beef seasoned with cumin, garlic, green peppers, and raisins), and a traditional Cuban sandwich (a wedge of ham, roast pork, and Swiss cheese dressed with a blend of butter, mayonnaise, pickles, and mustard and grilled until the bread is crusty). The Cuban immigrant owner from Guayos, Cuba, Francisco Corona, worked at GM for a brief period before opening his luncheonette. On the GM assembly line, there was a leveling of the language and ethnic divisions that segregated older Latinos and African Americans in the villages. The auto union to which all blue-collar workers at the plant belonged created a multiethnic working-class solidarity between African American and Latinos that made them feel comfortable eating together at Corona’s. “I had customers from all parts of the world, Cubans, Venezuelans, all kinds of Hispanics” and “a lot of African Americans,” Corona recalls. He estimates that he had more African American customers than Hispanics because perhaps twice as many of them worked at the plant in the 1960s. The African American workers, recalls Francisco Corona, “really like our kind of food.” Here are recipes below for Cuban sandwiches.

Traditional Cuban sandwich recipe: http://hubpages.com/hub/Cuban_Sandwich_Recipe

Leftover turkey Cuban sandwich recipe: http://paninihappy.com/leftover-turkey-panini-turkey-cuban-panini/

Vegan Cuban sandwich recipe: http://www.veganhappyhour.com/?p=367

Latino Cantinas and Eateries in the Tarrytowns

Coconut layer cake, this and other recipes below

During the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (1952-1959), Guayos residents responded to the corruption and repression of Batista’s regime by immigrating to Brooklyn and later to Tarrytown north of the city in Westchester County. In the 1950s, job opportunities at restaurants and factories, including General Motors were abundant in the Tarrytowns. The first Cubans who came to Westchester County in the 1950s were all single men. They tended to keep to themselves or to eat, drink, and dance with Puerto Ricans, going to their bars, clubs, and ballrooms in the Tarrytowns and Manhattan. By 1977, however, there were about 3,000 Cubans living in the Tarrytowns along with a few Dominicans, Venezuelans, and lots of Puerto Ricans. Combined there were enough Spanish-speaking immigrants to support two cocktail lounges on Cortland Street, La Embajada and La Teresa, and a Venezuelan Bar and Disco called La Arriba at 11 Beekman Avenue. The Latin cocktail lounges on Cortland Street were a stone’s throw from three African American bar and grills, De Carlo’s, the Upper-Class Men, and the Wonderful Bar. Cubans also founded their own social club in uptown North Tarrytown on Beekman Avenue. As the nature of these institutions makes clear, Latino immigrants and African Americans remained within their own urban borderlands in the Tarrytowns which included ethnic bars and restaurants. Black owned eateries in the Tarrytowns had menus that included southern foods: fried chicken, potato salad, corn bread, greens, sweet potato pie, and layer cakes. Here are recipes for what I call a “black church lady’s” coconut layer cake that’s perfect for holiday guest:

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

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

Hispanic Heritage Month Series: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/search?q=Hispanic+History+Month+Series