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: [Watch 25 min] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycmg/nyctvod/html/home/appt101.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/

Feeding the Revolution in Colonial North America

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 by Ducha Dennis)

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.

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+

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+

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

The Delicious Smells of Puerto Rico in Brooklyn Hallways

Tostones which are pounded and fried plantains served her with mojo sauce, this and other recipes below

Coming to the end of Hispanic Heritage Month and staying in New York City with my last two stories. In the 1950s and 1960s, a second wave of African American and Hispanic migrants arrived in New York. The number of Hispanic migrants, particularly Puerto Ricans, far outweighed the number of African Americans from the South. This was in part because beginning in the late 1950s, San Juan, Puerto Rico, served as the “international training ground” of the U.S. government’s Point Four Program, which promoted a U.S. capitalist model of development for the Third World as an alternative to Communism. In order for the program to work, the Truman administration and the Puerto Rican colonial government under Muñoz negotiated the emptying out of the island’s poorest sectors during the late 1940s, encouraging these areas’ inhabitants, “many of them mulattos,” to migrate to urban centers in the United States, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The poor received reduced airfare between the island and the mainland. Some 600,000 “mostly rural unskilled” Puerto Ricans filled the demand for cheap labor in U.S. manufacturing. A large number of Puerto Ricans settled in East Harlem/ El Barrio in the 1940s and more ethnically diverse “suburbs” of Brooklyn in the 1950s where they lived in recently created public housing projects with mostly Puerto Rican and blacks residents. Growing up in these ethnic borderlands meant having black and Latino people living on all sides of your family apartment. As result black youth grew up with the smells of southern dishes like chitlins, collard greens, and frying chicken up and down the hallways but they also grew up smelling Puerto Rican dishes like ropa vieja, mofongo, sancocho, andtostones. Here is a recipe for tostones which are pounded and fried plantains.

Traditional tostones recipe: http://www.elboricua.com/tostones.html

Tostones with cream sauce: http://stmemory.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/tostones/

Tostones with mojo sauce: http://foodimake.blogspot.com/2010/08/tostones.html

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

Latino and African American Jazz Artists and Food in Harlem

Fish and grits, recipe below

In the 1940s and 1950s Latino and African American jazz artists developed relationships because they shared common interests: cutting-edge jazz and, to a lesser degree, good, inexpensive food. Language barriers did not prevent blacks and Latinos from communicating, because they spoke in the universal language of music and the “bebop language.” The hip lingo of jazz artists bridged the customary gap between native English and Spanish speakers and allowed them to communicate with each other. “Most bebop language came about because some guy said something and it stuck. Another guy started using it, then another one, and before you knew it, we had a whole language,” writes Dizzy Gillespie. An ethnic subgroup of crossover artists interested in combining the best of Latin and North American jazz emulated each other’s music, language, and food in de facto segregated New York. This subgroup was most comfortable at the jazz clubs and multiethnic eateries which were located primarily in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. Harlem, the site of New York’s Club Harlem, Small’s Paradise, and the Savoy as well as the Odeon and the Apollo theaters, had a bunch of restaurants: the Bon Goo Barbecue (717 St. Nicholas Avenue, north of 145^th Street), the Red Rooster (2354 Seventh Avenue—between 137^th and 138^th Streets) Jock’s Place, almost next door at 2350 Seventh Avenue. Between 137^th and 138^th Streets, Obie’s at 270 West 135^th Street among others. Most of these restaurants had been open since the 1940s. The funny thing is, nobody called them soul food restaurants until the 1960s. Fried fish and grits represented a common menu item at allot of these African American operated restaurants in Harlem because so many black Harlem residents had southern roots. Here is a recipe for this great southern combo.

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

Healthy Fried Fish for Fish & Grits Recipe: http://www.chow.com/recipes/29070-healthy-fried-fish-for-fish-and-grits

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

Harlem And Upper West Side Eateries In the 1930s and 1940s

Mofongo topped with a tasty red sauce, sides of rice and kidney beans and a side of black beans, recipes below

I am in the midst of a series for Hispanic Heritage Month in which I am now discussing the restaurant and music scene in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. After Cubop began to catch on in 1947, it became even more common to see Latino and African Americans playing together in traditionally African American venues and afterward enjoying traditional southern and Caribbean food. Indeed, the blending and sharing of black and Hispanic cuisine extended beyond musicians and the after-hours joints. The WPA project “America Eats,” which was never published, reveals that Latin Americans, West Indians, and African Americans often frequented the same restaurants in Harlem and the Upper West Side. In the 1930s, these community restaurants were “patronized by a heterogeneous clientele of Latin-Americans, Spaniards, British West Indians, and African Americans.” For less than a dollar you could go to a Cuban or Puerto Rican restaurant and eat well. There was the Ideal at Lenox Avenue and 115th Street and the Toreador at Lenox and 110th Street. There was also Pascual Quintana’s El Carribe at 235 West 116th Street, where you could get mofongo con chicharrones, mashed green plantains mixed with mashed fried pig skin and covered with garlic, onion, and hot pepper sauce. El Favorito was a well-known Puerto Rican eatery in Spanish Harlem open twenty-four hours a day that sold rice and beans along with bread and butter for thirty-five cents.

Traditional Mofongo Recipe: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/dining/011mrex.html

Vegan Mofongo Video Recipe: http://veganricans.blogspot.com/2008/11/vegan-mofongo-w-fried-tempeh.html

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

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

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

Afro Latin Jazz and Cubop: Musical and Culinary Collaborations in New York

Chicken and waffles, links to various recipes below

Hispanic Heritage Month which ends on October 15. The series started with stories from the pre-Columbian exchange (before the arrival of Columbus) and how the various indigenous groups ate from the Ciboney, Carib, and Arawak in the Caribbean to the Aztec and Maya in Mesoamerica, the Inca in the Andes and further south the Gurani and Tupi in what is today Brazil. I also did a number of stories on the colonial and national periods. I'm ending the series with stories from my forthcoming book on Black and Latino Relations in New York 1959 to 1989 (Columbia University Press). Early in my current research project I am came across some rich primary sources on musical and culinary collaborations between African American migrants from the U. S. south and Hispanic migrants from the the Caribbean.  Before making it big and starting is on band in 1946, South Carolina native Dizzy Gillespie would play with several notable African American and Latin jazz bands. He would go on to start his own band which featured Afro-Cuban conga drum player “Chano” Pozo González. In 1947, Dizzy, Chano and others collaborated to create a new jazz genre they called cubop. The following year, highly visible nightspots like the Palladium, located at Broadway and 52nd Street, began booking celebrated Latin bands like Machito and the Afro-Cubans and the Tito Puente Orchestra. The Palladium was only half a block from Birdland, the New York jazz club named in honor of saxophonist Charlie Parker that acted as the jazz capital of the world, and the club became an important space for the coalescing of Hispanic and African American music. It often remained open to musicians until early in the morning and African American and Latino artists would play in jam sessions there followed by an inexpensive meal like chicken and waffles at their favorite restaurants. The legend goes that this northern soul food tradition began when artists in New York ordered chicken for breakfast after missing dinner on Saturday night because they were performing, and ordered waffles as hot bread to eat with the fried chicken. 

Chicken and Waffles: Practical Pairing Shows Up On Tampa Bay Menus”: http://www.tampabay.com/features/food/restaurants/chicken-and-waffles-practical-pairing-shows-up-on-tampa-bay-menus/1090727

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

Ethnic Borderlands And Foodways In Harlem

Pasteles or Puerto Rican-style tamales, this and other recipes below

Been writing about Hispanic foodways as part of Hispanic Heritage month September 15 to October 15. During the 1930s, the majority of metropolitan New York’s African American and Latin American residents lived, worked, and ate on the margins. Dining out was fraught with racial divisions. For example, prior to the passage of anti-discrimination laws after World War II, African Americans and Latinos in New York restaurants endured “inferior service, especially in terms of seat location [if they were seated at all], personal treatment, and length of wait,” writes one historian. Perhaps as a result of de facto segregation, African Americans and Latinos in New York developed a vibrant nightlife, with amazing restaurants and jazz clubs where they could socialize. According to one WPA report, African Americans and Latinos frequented some of the same restaurants and clubs during the 1930s many of them in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. Harlem eateries did their best business on weekends between 1 and 4 A.M., when “the merrymakers once more crowd[ed] the restaurant as soon as the theatre and the dance halls [were] closed” says one WPA writer from the America Eats Project. In Spanish Harlem, musicians and clubbers ordered tons of pasteles or Puerto Rican–style tamales made from stuffed mashed green plantains poultry, meat, and or vegetables such as pepper, olives, and capers. Here are some related recipes below.

Traditional meat lovers pastels/tamales: http://www.hispanic-culture-online.com/puerto-rican-pasteles.html

Vegan pastels/tamales: http://www.madelensrecipes.com/tag/pasteles-vegetarian-recipes/

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

The Cuban War for Independence Part 4

Cuban Mango Bread, this and other recipes below

Been talking about the role of food in the Cuban War for Independence 1895-1898. Revolutionaries had to be resourceful if they wanted to eat because the leaders of the revolutionary forces did not provide rations. In addition, Spanish authorities practiced a policy of relocating peasant sympathizers to military garrisons and the destruction of peasant crops and livestock as a way of starving their opponents. So how did revolutionary soldiers eat? They depended on peasants when they could, hunted wild game, stole, and planted crops when they could. Revolutionary soldier Esteban Montejo tells us that he and his comrades used what I call soul strategies to eat when food seemingly did not exist on the battle field. In my work as a historian one of my many definitions of soul 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/webFeatures is experiential wisdom about how to endure based on an amalgamation of West and Central African survival skills, as well as adaptations to conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. For example, Montejo tells us that soldiers made, mango flour by “cooking mango pulp without the pit.” Then you mixed the flour with lemon juice and wild “hot guaguao pepper” for a tasty and filling bread. This represented one of the many soulful ways Montejo and others feed themselves during the revolution. Here is Cuban Mango Bred recipe that shows the evolution of Cuban soul cuisine.


Cuban Mango Bread recipe


Ingredients:
2 cups spelt, whole wheat (or all purpose flour)
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup dried cherries, soaked in hot water for 10 min and drained
1 cup maple syrup (or sugar)
2 egg substitutes (or eggs)
2/3 cup canola oil (or other vegetable oil)
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cup chopped firm-ripe mangoes
1 tbsp lemon or lime juice


Method:
Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease two bread pans or use unbleached baking paper. In a medium bowl,
combine the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Add the dried cherries and mix well. In another bowl, beat together the sugar, eggs, and oil until fluffy and light colored, about 3 minutes with an electric mixer. Add the vanilla. Add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture and beat just until silky. Do not over stir. With a large spatula, work in the mangoes and lemon juice. Rub the batter into the pans. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Let cool before serving.


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


Cuba the Next Revolution a PBS Full Length Documentary 

The Cuban War for Independence Part 3

Afro-Cuban troops in a makeshift encampment 1898 Cuba

Chunky Sweet potato soup, this and other recipes below

When revolutionary soldiers in Cuba could not obtain food from peasants, or steal it from Spanish forces and their supporters, they turned to hunting and foraging for food. They also turned to cultivated subsistence gardens when circumstances permitted. “There were some places where you could have a garden,” says former revolutionary solider and Afro-Cuban Esteban Montejo. Born in 1860, Montejo, at some point during Cuba's Ten Year's War (1868-1878), escaped from slavery and lived on his own as a runaway where he learned to live off the land. Survival skills he learned as a slave and later as a runaway served him and other like him well during the War for Independence (1895-1898). By Montejos estimate 95 percent of Afro-Cubans fought in the ranks of the revolutionary forces, and many of them were former slaves as Spain did not abolish slavery in Cuba until 1886. Speaking of gardens in Camagüey, once a sleepy province in central Cuba, Montejo explains that a lack of conflict there allowed soldiers to sow subsistence crops such as mangos, “sweet potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like limas, limes, yucca, and peanuts” says Montejo. In my book Hog and Hominy I found that enslaved Africans grew and cooked with okra (African plant), sweet potatoes, or yams (African plant) almost universally around the Americas. Thus gardening techniques used to supplement their diets as slaves also feed them as revolutionaries. 

Chunky sweet potato soup recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Chunky-Sweet-Potato-Soup-239215

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

Cuba the Next Revolution a PBS Full Length Documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/featured/black-in-latin-america-full-episode-cuba-the-next-revolution/219