The Heinz History Center‘s exhibit From Slavery to Freedom tells the story of brave African Americans who fought for freedom and escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. This story isn’t new, but Sam Black, director of African-American programs at the Center, wanted to do something different.
“I wanted to look more into the African-American life experience,” he explains. He was curious how 19th-century African Americans lived, what they did and what they ate. So he contacted culinary historian and Maryland native Michael Twitty, who became an adviser to the History Center’s exhibit.
On Saturday, Twitty will visit the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in Avella, to discuss the centuries of tradition, commonly cooked into one meal.
From behind the stove, he will narrate an often-overlooked thread of the slavery story, what everyday life was like for African Americans more than two centuries ago. Over the course of his two-hour demonstration, titled “Beyond the Big House Kitchen: A Culinary History of American Slavery,” Twitty will cook a meal of fried chicken, okra soup, kush and hoecakes, the latter a type of cornmeal pancake that enslaved Africans made using the blade of their hoe as a skillet.
Food can reveal a lot about the way people lived. Twitty’s research has traced African-American cooking methods and ingredients back to West Africa, the region from which most of this country’s enslaved people came. There, Black explains, men traditionally had the job of food preparation. However, on plantations, the slave owners wanted the men to do more intense physical labor in the fields. African Americans were forced to conform to the European model, and food preparation became a woman’s job.
Some plantations allowed slaves to have gardens near their cabins. They preserved their West African roots by cultivating traditional ingredients, like hot peppers, greens, okra and peanuts. Many continued to farm these heirloom crops after they escaped the plantations. Sometimes they had to substitute, for example, swapping sweet potatoes for traditional African yams, which were not readily available in the United States.
The demonstration starts at 11 a.m. and is free with regular admission, which costs $12 for adults, $11 for senior citizens, and $6 for students and children ages 6-17. Admission is free for children under 5.
Meadowcroft Rockshelter is located in Avella, in Washington County, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2013.
If you’re hungry for history, Meadowcroft is the place to be on Saturday!
Hot peppers and peanuts are New World plants, are not African in origin, and would not have even been familiar to West Africans.
I’m a progressive, and I admire this type of article and the activity it is promoting- but I cannot abide by gross misrepresentation of basic facts.
As progressives, we should strive to rise above the type of ignorance and “manufactured facts” that our our political enemies employ so regularly.
@Richard: I’m sure Mr. Twitty could explain better, but my understanding is that both hot peppers and peanuts came from South America/the Caribbean originally, were brought back to Europe by the Spanish, and spread to Africa years before North America was colonized. They were in regular use there before they came to North America with African slaves. African slaves being taken to North America in the 18th and 19th centuries would’ve been used to peanuts and hot peppers, as they’d been in West African for generations by that point.
some seem to be forgetting the length of history that the slave trade spanned. hot peppers and peanuts both crossed the Atlantic through European ships to West Africa. Chile pepper plants for instance arrived as one of the trade goods of the slave trade during the 16th century, and become absorbed into African cuisine. Portugeuse explorers brought peanut plants from Brazil to Central Africa as early as the 1500s and it became quickly adopted there. by the 18th and certainly the 19th century, it is quite possible that both had become part of traditional West African cuisine. let’s move away from outmoded notions that West Africa was this non-site of contact to the Americas, when in fact Europeans and Africans created entire Creolized cultures that blended languages, customs and trade goods for centuries along the West African coast, including items/goods from the Americas.