Dey ’s a-wokin’ in de qua’tahs a-preparin’ fu’ de feas’,
So de little pigs is feelin’ kind o’ shy.
De chickens ain’t so trus’ful ez dey was, to say de leas’,
An’ de wise ol’ hens is roostin’ mighty high.
You could n’t git a gobblah fu’ to look you in de face–
I ain’t sayin’ whut de tu’ky ’spects is true;
But hit’s mighty dange’ous trav’lin’ fu’ de critters on de place
F’om de time dat log commence a bu’nin’ thoo.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, A Back-Log Song*
Slave Family
Tragically, African slaves rarely learned to read and write, it being considered dangerous to their white masters to allow literacy running rampant. And so, except for accounts left by white slaveowners and others, very little writing exists concerning the diet and cooking of slaves. Archaeological excavations of slave cabins reveal interesting material, as do oral histories miraculously recorded in the 1930s. After the Civil War, some former slaves learned to read and write and left accounts of their lives under slavery.
Like a trail of crumbs, what remains renders up clues to where dietary trends and celebration foods came from.
For slaves, the Christmas season broke the back-breaking monotony of their lives.
Cookbooks written by descendants of slaves offer one view of the slave diet at Christmas time. Or at least what they might aspire to.
In The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna Lewis, a superb African-American cook and chef, depicted in detail the Christmas foods that she and her family enjoyed in Freetown, Virginia, an enclave of freed slaves. Her grandparents were among those freed. Miss Lewis recalled making plum pudding and fruitcakes with her mother. Their larder also included “oranges, almonds, Brazil nuts, and raisins that came in clusters.” Another traditional food brought on rapturous longings: “And although we were miles from the sea, at Christmas one of the treats we always looked forward to was oysters. The oysters were delivered to Lahore’s [grocery] in barrels on Christmas Eve day … .“ The list of foods prepared clearly demonstrates abundance:
Photo credit: Matthew Musgrove
Baked ham
Smothered rabbit
Mixed small birds
Braised guinea hen
Liver pudding (recipe below)
Roasted wild turkey (occasionally)
Pickles made from cucumber, watermelon rind, crab apples, and peaches
Traditional holiday desserts also shone gloriously on the heavily laden tables: layer cakes (caramel, coconut), pound cake, fruitcake, fudge, peanut brittle, sugar cookies, mince pies, and fruit pies made with canned summer fruits.
While the women cooked, the men made wine from wild plums, elderberries, dandelions, and grapes.
It’s not hard to imagine that at least some of Miss Lewis’s ancestors served as cooks in the great houses on Virginia plantations, including that of Claiborne R. Mason, the landowner who gave her relatives the land for their town.
She invited her readers into the kitchen with her superb writing and recipes, including the following menus for meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, evocative of plantation cuisine.
Her menu for Christmas Eve Supper:
Ham Biscuits
Oyster Stew
Baked Country Ham
Scalloped Potatoes
Pan-Braised Spareribs
Crusty Yeast Bread — Ham Biscuits
Wild Blackberry Jelly — Watermelon Rind Pickles
Yellow Vanilla Pound Cake — Hickory Nut Cookies — Sugar Cookies
Dandelion Wine — Plum Wine
Coffee
Her menu for Christmas Day Breakfast:
Oysters (Photo credit: Andy Ciordia)
Pan-Fried Oysters
Eggs Sunny-Side Up
Liver Pudding
Pork Sausage
Skillet-Fried Potatoes
Biscuits
Butter
Wild Strawberry Preserves
Bourbon
Coffee
Other accounts of slave food at Christmas rely on spoken language.
According to the reminiscences of a black cook named Annie Hale, Christmas day dinner for her sharecropper family provided the biggest feast of the year. Her family ate ham — this was the only time it appeared on the table, salted-down spareribs, sliced sweet potatoes spiced with nutmeg, yeast rolls made with white flour (a luxury), and four cakes – caramel, chocolate, plain, and coconut. Neighbors came to visit, eat cake, and drink homemade wine, in a manner similar to what Edna Lewis experienced. (Evan Jones, American Food: The Gastronomic Story, p. 106)
The plethora of cakes seems astonishing. Other popular holiday cakes reflect American tastes and ingredients: Tea Cake, Stack Cake, and Molasses Cake.
Former slave Harriet Jacobs, in Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl, described Christmas festivities during slavery:
Christmas is a day of feasting, both with white and colored people. Slaves, who are lucky enough to have a few shillings, are sure to spend them for good eating; and many a turkey and pig is captured, without saying, “By your leave, sir.” Those who cannot obtain these, cook a ‘possum, or a raccoon, from which savory dishes can be made. My grandmother raised poultry and pigs for sale and it was her established custom to have both a turkey and a pig roasted for Christmas dinner.
Slaves generally received a week off at Christmas, except for the cooks and house servants. Following a custom imported from England, similar to Boxing Day traditions, the masters presented their slaves with gifts, often in the form of shoes, money, or alcohol. (1)
Tempie Cummins, Ex-Slave
But the real treasure in beginning to look at slave Christmas customs lies in precious oral history. Much of the knowledge of slavery conditions come from a far-seeing project carried out under the supervision of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Between 1936 and 1938, interviewers recorded the memories of over 2,300 former slaves still living in the United States.
Mary Reynolds, a former slave living in Dallas, Texas, told WPA interviewers:**
They give all the niggers [sic] fresh meat on Christmas and a plug tobacco all round. The highes’ cotton picker gits a suit of clothes and all the women what had twins that year gits a outfittin’ of clothes for the twins and a double, warm blanket.
And another former slave, Booker T. Washington, recalled Christmas-time hog butchering in Virginia:
This was one of the incidents which usually preceded a Virginia Christmas. There is another which I still vividly remember. It was at this season that the year’s crop of hogs was killed, and the meat for the ensuing year was cured and stored away in the smokehouse. This came, as a rule, during the week before Christmas, and was, as I recollect it, one of the annual diversions of plantation life. I recall the great blazing fire flaring up in the darkness of the night and grown men and women moving about in the flickering shadows. I remember with what feelings of mingled horror and hungry anticipation I looked at the long rows of hogs hung on the fence-rail, preparatory to being cut up and salted away for the year. For days after this event every slave cabin was supplied with materials for a sumptuous feast.
He also wrote about liver pudding, a dish very similar to French patés.
What none of this truly conveys is the tremendous culinary legacy passed down by slave women who cooked in the Great Houses.
How did illiterate slaves cook from cookbooks or know how to cook all those dishes that Edna Lewis lists as Christmas foods? Jane Carson, in Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients in Colonial Cooking, quotes an aged slave named Isaac, who was interviewed in the 1840s and said that his mother was the pastry cook for Thomas Jefferson’s household. Isaac recollected that “Mrs. Jefferson would come out there [to the kitchen] with a cookery book in her hand and read out of it to Isaac’s mother h0w to make cakes, tarts, and so on.”
Edna Lewis’s Liver Pudding
“We kept it by setting it into the spring box or the meat house on a low shelf to keep cool.” (Also called Liver Mush.)
1 ½ lbs. fresh pork liver
1 ½ lbs. fresh pork jowl or 1 ½ lbs. fresh unsalted pork middling or unsalted bacon
1 medium onion
2 cups liquid from boiled liver mixture
2 t. salt
½ t. freshly ground black pepper
1 t. fresh sage
1 heavy tin loaf pan or 1 2 ½-qt. casserole
The liver should not be sliced; leave it in one piece. The jowl should be in one piece as well, and is cooked in the skin. If fresh bacon or middling is used, the lean is removed. Place the liver, jowl, and onion in a pot with enough cold water to cover abut 2 inches above the meat. Set to cook on a medium-high burner until the pot begins to simmer. Cook gently until the jowl is tender, about two hours. Remove the meat and onion from the pot and leave to cool. Cut the liver and jowl with their skins into small pieces and put them through a food chopper or meat grinder along with the onion. Alternate fat and liver to keep the mill from clogging up. When all is ground, add 2 cups of the liquid from the cooked liver mixture. Pour off the top water and use the bottom liquid because it contains residue from the cooked meat. Stir in the liver mixture; you will have a very liquid batter. Then add in salt, pepper, and sage. Mix well and pour into the tin loaf pan or casserole. Bake in a preheated 250 degree F oven for 2 ½ hours until the pudding has completely dried down. If not cooked enough, the pudding will not slice properly. It is the long cooking that develops the fine flavor of the pudding. Remove from oven. When cool, place in cold place or the refrigerator.
The following video offers visual background to some of the spirituals sung by African slaves. Watch up to 3:20 minutes (the rest is twentieth century and a tribute to Martin Luther King). The link takes you right to the YouTube site and it takes a bit of time to load. There’s some, if brief, interesting footage of pounding grain.
*Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in dialect, as well as classical English.
**The language in this quote is taken directly from the words of the informant.
(1) In 1850, one slaveowner — Thomas B. Chaplin — of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, wrote in his journal on Christmas day, “I only wish the Negroes were at work. I had nothing to give them but a few turnips, but they are satisfied, **pretend to be** and I suppose to enjoy themselves, though I don’t.” From: Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter : With the Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822-1890), by Theodore Rosengarten (1992), p. 516.
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
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