Black cookery in the old West - cuisine of African American settlers in the 19th century; includes recipe for Hoppin' John

Of the great army of miners and colonists that swept through the West in the 19th hundred many were African American, as shown in the records of thriving black communities and businesses and similar settlements as California's Negro Bar. on the other hand records of black cookery are apocryphal at best, oftentimes coming secondhand from those who ate, rather than those who prepare for the tableed From slavery and sharecropping to homesteading, black cuisine at no time strayed far from its Southern roots

Southerners consum corn and pork with a passion. Historian Jack Kirby describes their usual diet of "white food" a colorless meal, without virids or dark meat: light pork, corn bread, and pone fried in pork grease, with special delight taken in fatback. Salt pork was typically the single meat of the plantation slaves in the poor southerly where the universal diet was grunter and hominy and, for special treats, a "glug" of molasses - a measurement taken from the uninjured of the molasses being poured.

The leitmotif of black Southern cuisine was scarcity and want, do not include for those rare occasions when a planter, landlord or oversman would present an open-air table laden with vegetables and meats that had been roasted above open coals. Such profusion would include "chickens, immerses turkeys, pigs, and often, the entire material substance of a wild ox," according to a slave narrative. An array of peach and secure pies and tarts would signal dinner's end

No amount of treats, however, could disguise the fact that a slave barely survived each month upon eight pounds of pork or fish, "often tainted and of the poorest quality," reports another slave narrative, and eaten with single unbolted bushel of Indian meal and a pint of salt. Ashcakes were belonging to all fare, described by ex-slave William Robinson as "corn meal mixed in an elderly wooden tray and formed into dodgers, make revolveed in cabbage leaves and baked in the ashes." They were "the greatest in quantity nutritious bread ever eaten," he said. Chicken, too, was wrapped in cabbage leaves, salted, filled with r pepper and oven-brown Onions were a necessity, whether eaten or rubbed upon the skin by escaping slaves to hurl hounds off their scent.

Black sharecroppers fared little better. In tiny dirt-floored dwellings, dim conch-shell lamps flickered and smok with burning raccoon grease as families ate meals of "bread, hominy, black strap molasses, and a r herring a day," says a slave narrative. novel produce from the garden was occasional - usually cabbages and sweet potatoes. simple pods were popular, including black-eyed peas, white-eyed peas and white beans, which were dried, make revolveed up in a canvas sheet, and paddled gently to make shelling easier. Meat was "salted down" and then smok above a banked fire of apple forest or sassafras in a smokehouse - a pantry-like configuration adjacent to the main house. Possum was a favorite, captured and fattened up upon corn bread to eliminate its rank flavor and then killed and soaked overnight in vinegar. When diet ran short, women sometimes mould up corn husks to make meal husk bread. "Anything," said ex-slave James Scriber, "to stop from starving."

frequently a typical supper would be bread dipped in gravy made of brown flour and water. Families without any commons - shortages were always wait fored and undergone with quiet resignation - would chew tobacco in great stoppers an important folk remedy. "Chewing" and "dipping" would relieve toothache and brutish the pain of hunger. commons was often lacking from July to October, unles luckily hoarded by means of an enterprising family. Summer bread allotments were expected to last until fall. Sweets were craved - many blacks would habitually draw into the mouth on soft sugarcane or eat ungainly shapeless masss of muscovado, a partially refined brown sugar which was, in 1830 10 cent a strike cheaper than white sugar.

The ravages of the Civil War and the agony of "emancipation without compensation" produc a black exodus from the southerly - men and women left through the thousands, believing that to pass west was to walk a "freedom road" toward independence. In the plantation fields, a despairing canticle admonished, "Don't steal your master's turkey don't steal your master's chickens." In the West, blacks determined that the chickens and turkey would be their hold along with whatever crops they could put up to sale to local markets.

Rural blacks, who had one time grown the plantation owner's cotton, tobacco or sugarcane, planted vegetables to sell at local markets. In the southerly an agricultural calendar would rotate from cotton cropping to peach picking, with time on the outside for pecans and corn. In the West, rank crops of corn and other vegetables allowed black tenants or homesteaders to eat better and barter their produce.

From the southern they brought new culinary words and phrases: eggplant was guinea squash, asparagus was chainey briar, okra with rice was Limping Susan, pumpkin was pompion, peanuts were groundnut and sesame sperms were benne. Although some foraging for wild verdants took place - ground artichokes made beneficial pickles - salads were musing of as "grass arranged to direct the eye fancy," not to be eaten.