Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food

Abstract

Contemporary African American and Afro-Caribbean cookbook authors and food memoirists seek to make the past of slavery seem more relevant and meaningful to twenty-first century readers by invoking the idea of ‘slave food’ as some common ground between themselves as eating subjects and the countless bondspeople who struggled to ensure their loved ones had enough nourishment to face the arduous tasks that lay before them every grinding day during the time of slavery. This essay turns to Marianne Hirsch's concept of ‘postmemory’ to elucidate the historical impulse to cook and eat the past as a way of understanding what it took to survive the trauma of chattel slavery practiced in the American South and throughout the Caribbean, by reading the individual recipes for slave food as textual snapshots that lend an aura of historical authenticity to each writer's representation of a communal legacy indelibly marked by the trauma of transatlantic slavery. Following Grant Farred's and Paul Gilroy's lead, I argue that the cookbook authors emerge as ‘grounded vernacular intellectuals’, whose professional knowledge of food preparation and the culinary arts give them the authority to discuss the cultural implications of cooking and eating traditional foodways, whereas the memoirists emerge as ‘conventionally trained intellectuals’ because of their formal education and institutional ties to the academy, as manifested in the pages of their books. Both sets of writers perform the memory work of honoring their unnamed slave ancestors through the publication of their food writing. Through the expository prose of the recipes, these texts invite the reader to join in the process of theorising the past of slavery by simulation (eating like slaves) and incorporation (eating like slaves). The goals of the type of memory work performed by these texts are to educate as well as feed its readers.

Notes

¹ Angela Shelf Medearis reminds readers that slave cooks had the potential to poison their masters' families if they so chose, thereby emphasising the plantation kitchen as a domain of both servitude and of revolution. Joe Randall and Toni Tipton-Martin prefer to emphasise the artistry of slave cooks who, in their view, created the Southern cuisine that whites later claimed as their own. Ntozake Shange and Austin Clarke, for their part, discuss field slaves primarily in their respective celebrations of slave food.

² Farred contrasts his model to Gramsci's in more depth in the Introduction to his work, and fully discusses the overlaps and differences of these two different styles of vernacularity.

³ This government initiative was part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration's efforts to combat the Great Depression by putting unemployed people from all fields to work in a variety of state-sponsored projects that benefited the nation as a whole.

⁴ The first of these books was published during the Civil War and reflected the domestic arrangements of plantation life, while the second was published some twenty years after the end of the war between the states, and bemoaned the passing of the era during which ‘mammies’ prepared food in Southern households. Medearis wrongly cites the date for the Picayune's Creole Cook Book as 1885; it was first published in 1900.

⁵ The same volume has been published under various titles in both the United States and Canada; each title reflects a different ideological definition of the same type of cuisine: Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir (2000a), and Love and Sweet Food (2004).