African American Culinary History and the Genesis of American Cuisine: Foodways and Slavery at Montpelier

ABSTRACT

American Southern foodways emerged in large part within the kitchens of slave plantations, where enslaved Black cooks incorporated African, Native American, and European practices and foods to create distinctly American food traditions. We use animal remains excavated from James Madison’s Montpelier to illuminate early American cuisines in the Virginia piedmont. Black foodways at Montpelier were not monolithic. Pork and beef were the dominant meats consumed by all enslaved community members, and all communities supplemented their rations with their own subsistence pursuits to some extent. However, differential access to time, technology, and contact with white enslavers led to disparate circumstances for enslaved communities in terms of their relative reliance on rationed meats versus wild game, particularly fish.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• foodways
• cuisine
• zooarchaeology
• Montpelier
• Virginia
• plantations
• US Southeast

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank graduate students Derek Anderson, Lisa Janz, Vincent LaMotta, Nicole Mathwich, and Drew Webster, as well as undergraduate students Diego Torres Diaz, James Dehlinger, Maya Koepke, and Lauren Benz for their contribution to the zooarchaeological remains from Montpelier. The authors are grateful to Larry McKee for his permission to reproduce the figure from his 1999 publication. Many thanks to graduate students Ellen Platts and Angela Bailey for their assistance formatting the many complicated figures and tables. Finally, we are extremely grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their time and labor – the final manuscript is much improved thanks to their thoughtful and thorough comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A button depicting a hunting scene was recovered from the South Yard. The object can be viewed online at https://flic.kr/p/nKS2Et.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the analysis of zooarchaeological remains from Montpelier were provided by Cynthia Reusche, and the Montpelier Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman

Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD at the University of Georgia in 2001 and is interested in zooarchaeology of the colonial period in southeastern and southwestern North America.

Scott Oliver

Scott Oliver received his MAA from the University of Maryland in 2017. He is currently Assistant Lab Manager for the Veterans Curation Program in Alexandria, Virginia.

Chance Copperstone

Chance Copperstone received an MA in Applied Anthropology from the University of Arizona. He is a project manager and principal investigator for Tierra Right of Way Services in Tucson, Arizona. His current research interests include zooarchaeology and the prehistory of the North American Southwest.

Matthew Reeves

Matthew Reeves is Director of Archaeology at James Madison’s Montpelier, a position he has held since 2000. He received his PhD at Syracuse University in 1997 and is interested in the archaeology of enslaved communities in the North American South and Caribbean.

Marybeth Harte

Marybeth Harte received a BA in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and an MA in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina. She is currently an archaeologist at Logan Simpson in Tempe, Arizona. Her research interests include zooarchaeology, foodways, colonialism, and historical ecology.