Greens in Black and White
By WARREN ST. JOHN
O most Southerners, few things are as pleasing as plopping down before a heaping plate of simple, home-style cooking — dishes like collard or turnip greens, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, corn bread, sweet potato casserole. This type of food is so evocative of the easygoing contentment of home that Southerners — and even much of the rest of America — refer to it simply as comfort food.
But there’s a potentially uncomfortable conversation to be had about Southern comfort food, one that has simmered like creamy gravy on a stove top for perhaps 20 years and may now reach a very public boil: how much of what is called Southern cooking can be traced to black culture, and how much to white?
That discussion is the centerpiece of a conference that begins tomorrow at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the fifth annual gathering of the Southern Foodways Alliance. With this year’s conference, “Southern Food in Black & White,” organizers and participants plan to take head-on the task of trying to sort out who gets credit for what’s on the Southern table.
It will not be easy or neat. At past Southern Foodways conferences, discussions on the origin of fried chicken, barbecue and Southern baked goods like biscuits have led to shouting matches. Participants at this year’s discussion, particularly chefs and food historians who say they are fighting for what they believe is the proper recognition for their ancestors’ role in the creation of Southern cuisine, expect it to be similarly heated.
“It’s not about, `Sit there quiet in the corner and wait to get credit,’ because that’s not going to happen,” said Joe Randall, an African-American chef from Savannah, Ga., who says blacks haven’t been given proper credit for their contribution to Southern food. “You have to go forth and claim the contribution that our forefathers have made.”
In some ways the debate over the African-American influence on Southern food is a more opaque version of the debate over black contributions to rock ‘n’ roll. It’s accepted that because blacks long served as cooks to Southern whites, first as slaves and then as domestics, they had a profound influence on the cuisine. But because whites wrote and published most of the early cookbooks on Southern food, there are few culinary equivalents of early Robert Johnson recordings to establish the provenance of particular dishes.
“Who did the original, and who did the cover?” asked Jessica B. Harris, an African-American food historian and cookbook author. “It’s about acknowledging the unacknowledged.”
But many white Southerners, particularly the poor and descendants of impoverished Appalachian yeomen who never had slaves and who could not have afforded domestic help, argue that Southern food must have been theirs. “If you talk to rural white people, they feel that that’s their food,” said Nathalie Dupree, the writer, whose books include the influential “New Southern Cooking,” just released in paperback by the University of Georgia Press. “When you say maybe this came from Africa, they look at you like you’re crazy.”
And there’s even a debate about whether there should be a debate. Some chefs argue that because of the influence of American Indians, Asians and intermarriage on local cuisine, attempting to sort out who contributed what is an impossible and ultimately pointless task.
“Food belongs to everybody,” said Leah Chase, a New Orleans chef widely recognized as the doyenne of Creole cooking and a member of Southern Foodways who has long criticized the debate over the origin of Southern food. “If I take a mess of greens and cook them and serve them to you, are they my greens, or your greens? Of course not. They’re everybody’s greens.”
Sorting out white from black is difficult in part because in the South white and black cuisines are remarkably similar. Consider the lunch menus at two restaurants across town from each other in Tuscaloosa, Ala. At the Waysider, which has a mostly white clientele, customers can dine on fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas and corn bread, delivered to the table in small plastic bowls and washed down with sweet tea.
Across town at KSV, which serves a mostly black clientele, the lunchtime menu includes country fried steak, collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas, macaroni and cheese, green beans and corn bread. Joe Taylor, the owner of KSV, said there are only a couple of dishes on the menu that are pretty much exclusively ordered by his black customers: neck bones, and hog maws, or the lining of a pig’s stomach.
“It’s no different, really,” he said. “It just depends on who buys it.”
Even the most basic generalizations about what foods are black in origin and which white are fraught. Hot peppers, melons, okra, rice and sesame seeds are thought to have been introduced to the South from Africa, along with techniques like slow-cooking greens with fat flavoring, a style of cooking similar to the one used to make leafy African stews. Creamy sauces and gravies, along with biscuits, white-flour pastries, puddings and trifles, are usually credited to the European influence. But John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, said any such sweeping statements are bound to spark arguments.
“When you say black folks eat more chitlins, you start to get in trouble, because a food like that is totemic to white and black Southerners,” he said. “Both see it as reaching back to the tough times they survived. Both see it as food imbued with meaning, and that doesn’t go away.”
For years African-Americans were given credit for comfort food, though in a complicated way. Adrian Miller, a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton and the program director of the symposium, said that in surveys he had done of old Southern cookbooks from the late 1800’s and the first half of the 20th century, white authors were comfortable crediting black cooks for the cuisine, so long as that acknowledgment was tied up in nostalgia for the old South and its racial hierarchy.
Mr. Randall, the African-American chef from Savannah, said there was a kind of perverse compliment to blacks in advertising symbols from those days, like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.
“Madison Avenue had it right in the 1930’s,” he said. “A big healthy black woman in the kitchen cooking was synonymous with good food.”
The willingness of whites to acknowledge black contributions to Southern food diminished during the civil rights movement, Mr. Miller said, when African-Americans began to assert their claim on Southern cuisine. The term soul food, for example, gained currency in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as part of that effort. Some black chefs and food historians now say the term is limiting because it marginalizes the black version of Southern food, which, they argue, is mostly black food to begin with.
“I think it’s an intricate part of food in America, but it’s not the totality of the contribution African-Americans have made,” Mr. Randall said. “If you limit it to the food in Harlem and mom and pop soul food places in the South, then you devalue it.”
The Southern Foodways symposium in Oxford will try to balance serious academic discourse with good eating. The conference will begin with a whole pig roast, and over three days — and meals of fried catfish, Coca-Cola brisket, grillades and deviled eggs — attendees will hear lectures with titles like “Possum ‘n’ Taters — Where Have You Gone?” and “Methods and Ethnographics of Watermelon Pickles.”
In the past talk in these sessions has inevitably turned to race, whether that was the primary aim or not, and frequently the conversations resulted in hurt feelings. A speaker who claimed that fried chicken had European origins, for instance, caused “a collective hissy fit,” Mr. Edge said.
Discussions of barbecue were similarly charged; white attendees pointed out that poor whites in the mountains were long known to have barbecued meat, while black participants countered that in the old South, the task of keeping a hickory fire burning through the night would have fallen to African-Americans.
“We’ve had shouting matches,” Ms. Dupree said. “I’ve been infuriated, because people have called me racist, just because I would say something was white. It’s taught me how emotional an issue this is.”
Mr. Edge said the hope of the conference was that by dealing directly with the issue of race and Southern food, something like an understanding could be achieved.
“I think we fussed with each other more than we do now,” he said. “There’s the same passion in discussion, but there’s an ethic that spans the conversation. We may not be of like minds, but we like this food. We love to eat well, and we’re going to stay up late and party, but we hope the discussion naturally gravitates toward issues of racial reconciliation.”
Originally published in NY Times – October 6, 2004
or years, the Loew’s Victoria Theater, a once-elegant vaudeville house and movie palace, has languished on West 125th Street in Harlem.
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