CHAPTER 9.
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.
Sit-ins, Soul Food, and Increasing Culinary Diversity
Atlanta, Georgia- The capital of the New South had held little attraction for me. My first trip there was a humiliating quest for an errant boyfriend that ended with tears, a breakup, and a two-day hangover; it was my first trip to the South. The only good thing about that trip more than thirty-five years ago is that it allowed me to see "Sweet" Auburn Avenue before it became "gentrified." Somehow, I knew enough to take time out from my fruitless mission to sample some of the legendary fried chicken at the old Paschal's restaurant. Paschal's is one of the restaurants where Martin Luther King and his disciples planned some of their Civil Rights strategy. Even in that bad time for me, as I sat in the restaurant, I wondered which booth Dr. King had occupied and what his favorite dishes had been. I was told that the fried chicken figured largely on the menu at those meetings.
It seems that every Southern city has a similar restaurant in the former black part of town. During the Civil Rights Movement, it was the place that became the hub where people from the movement met and planned their strategy. Birmingham has one, as do Memphis, Mobile, and Montgomery. New Orleans has Dooky Chase, and Atlanta has Paschal's and also had Deacon's, although it, like many others, did not survive. Back in the day, they all had similar finished-basement-type decor, with red vinyl booths and knotty-pine paneling on the walls. They also had homey waitresses who cajoled diners into eating more than was good for them and wore nylon uniforms that fitted tightly across ample bosoms, often with a highly starched handkerchief perched like a corsage on one side. The menus all harked back to the comfort food of the South: Pig was the preeminent meat, and the pungent aroma of chitterlings often perfumed the kitchen. Pigs' feet were also offered, and great delight was taken in sucking the hot-sauce-dotted meat off the bones. Pork chops were cooked to a solid well-done and smothered with thick brown gravy. Side dishes included tender candied yams (yes, they were sweet potatoes), dripping with sugar and cinnamon in every bite. There were always greens-be they collards, turnips, or mustards or a mix of all three-handpicked over and freshly cooked. They were served with smoked pig or, in later years, a smoked turkey wing. Okra figured significantly on most menus, turning up in gumbo or served as stewed okra in a mix of tomato and onion or as Southern succotash with corn and tomatoes. For dessert, there was an array of the teeth-achingly sweet confections that had become hallmarks of African American food: bubbling cobblers filled with seasonal fruit, bread puddings, rice puddings with and without raisins, fluffy coconut cakes, densely rich pound cakes, yellow cakes with chocolate frosting, and more (though red velvet cake had not become ubiquitous at this point). Then there were the pies-flaky crusts made with lard topped by or underpinned with freshly made fillings: sweet potato pie, syrupy pecan pie, and nutmeg-scented apple pie. There was always rice in the kitchen to put under the rich cream gravy that accompanied the fried chicken, and the bread basket boasted fluffy squares of hot corn-bread and often hot biscuits. These places were also open for breakfast, and those fortunate enough to greet the day in them ate biscuits and syrup: karo, cane, or sorghum, and only occasionally maple. There were eggs aplenty done to order, sausage patties (not links), and South or North there were grits.
Some restaurants, like Atlanta's Deacon's and New York's Cope-land's, did not survive the late-twentieth-century changes in African American dietary and dining habits and the gentrification of their neighborhoods that later years would bring. Others, like Chicago's Army and Lou's, seem preserved in the amber of their times. Paschal's, though, had, like Atlanta, grown and prospered since my first visit. A recent trip to the city that I have come to understand and enjoy led me to stay in the hotel-restaurant complex that Paschal's has become. The rooms were motel minimalist, but the restaurant was trendy, popular, and the poster child for the New Atlanta: it displayed all the possibilities that exist there for those with gumption and nerve.
Paschal's and other places like it, South and North, were pivot points of history: places where black entrepreneurship met up with the growing national movement for Civil Rights for African Americans. They were hubs in vibrant African American communities. In the North, they were refuges for homesick expatriate black Southerners, places where those who had ridden the trains and walked the roads northward in search of better opportunities could gather and indulge their physical and psychic need for the food of their remembered Southern pasts. In the South, the restaurants were places where African Americans knew that they would be welcomed in the days when welcome was most assuredly not offered by white establishments. In the 1950s and 1960s they became gathering places for dissent-places where the next chapter in the African American quest for full equality would be strategized and plotted, organized and launched. It is somehow fitting that so much of the organization of the Civil Rights Movement took place around tables in home kitchens and restaurants like Paschal's and others. After all, during the 350 -year-plus history of African Americans in this country, we were relegated to the kitchen and kept in actual or metaphorical servitude. The food that flourished in these restaurants during the 1960s and 1970s came to be known as soul food because it fed the spirit as much as the body on the long march to institutionalized equality.
The die was cast when President Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948, toward the end of World War II. The postwar era in the United States was one of unprecedented optimism and growth for the middle classes. Returning soldiers could take advantage of the G.I. Bill and get a subsidized education. Homes were being built in new suburbs and people were moving out from the cities. Affluence was all around. Supermarkets sprouted across the country; the aisles were filled with new products to go into the shiny refrigerators and freezers that many now acquired. Men got out their Hawaiian shirts and their aprons and headed to their newly acquired backyards to light up barbecue grills and indulge in another national fad. "Quick" and "convenient" were the watchwords of the day for the myriad American women who had gone into the job market to help the war effort and who did not return to their former role as tenders of home and hearth at its end. Products like Minute Rice, fish sticks, Lipton onion soup mix, and Betty Crocker and Pillsbury cake mixes proliferated on the shelves. Those who had seen the war in Japan and Italy, France and the South Pacific, had also experienced different foods, and the national taste profile expanded. Hope seemed to be a glowing beacon on the horizon for many Americans, but not for African Americans.
For African American soldiers returning from the war, life was different. Some certainly were able to take advantage of the benefits the war had brought, but there was also a renewed sense of the urgent need for full equality. After all, they'd bandaged the wounded, fed the forces, helped on the home front in the armament factories and the naval yards; they'd done all the dirty work. The glorious Tuskegee Airmen had even guided American bombers to their destinations, never losing a plane. It was time for the country that had ignored or neglected them for generations to step up and finally make things equal. Returning black soldiers arrived home with a different attitude toward the second-class citizenship that had been their lot. Different racial attitudes in Europe had also confirmed that the American way of life was not the only way. There was a better way to be, and it was time for the United States to understand that. African American soldiers were not coming home from the fronts to be shut out of the American dream once again.
Returning African American soldiers came back to a South that was rigidly segregated: education, housing, public accommodations, and dining were strictly delineated according to color. Jim Crow laws still affected Southern voters, making the disenfranchisement complete. In the North, an increasingly affluent white middle-class population moved to the newly constructed suburbs. They left the Northern blacks-who had moved to the urban centers in search of jobs that were declining in a postwar economy-relegated to living in inner-city neighborhoods that were slumping into deterioration. Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka began a series of legal decisions that eradicated the Jim Crow laws and brought the possibility of full equality closer to reality. It declared, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision, followed in 1955 by another referred to as began a series of legal decisions that eradicated the Jim Crow laws and brought the possibility of full equality closer to reality. It declared, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision, followed in 1955 by another referred to as Brown II Brown II, mandated that the dismantling of the unequal school systems should begin with "all deliberate speed." Change was about to come to America.
After an initial brief period of calm, during which it looked as though the process might be attained through legislative means, the decisions were met with massive resistance on the part of white Southern hard-liners, who were more than willing to fight to maintain the "Southern way of life." The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 defined in the minds of many African Americans north and south just what the "Southern way of life" had been for blacks for more than 350 years. The press for equality escalated. The Montgomery bus boycott brought Rosa Parks immortality and Martin Luther King Jr. fame and set the stage for and defined future protests. The increasing protests depended on highly organized black communities with capable and committed leaders. They were well orchestrated to not only attain small goals but also focus national attention on the South and on the need for racial equality in the country. Activists used a network of black churches. They also met at local black restaurants, like Atlanta's Paschal's and New Orleans's Dooky Chase, and in private homes, where they gathered around kitchen tables to strategize over platters of the traditional foods of the African American South-like fried chicken, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese-as they planned their campaigns.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a loose confederation of churches, community organizations, and civil rights groups, was formed, and it started to gain prominence and the support of liberal whites north and south. Soon it began to challenge the power of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the traditional black leadership organization, which had been instrumental in the passing of the historic Brown Brown decisions in 1954. SCLC advanced the movement, but most important, SCLC began to train student activists on black college campuses in the South who provided the next wave of protest. This wave did not start at the kitchen tables or the black restaurants where King and his followers had planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, it started at the lunch counter of a five-and-dime store, where the menu ran to hamburgers and grilled cheese or chicken salad sandwiches. decisions in 1954. SCLC advanced the movement, but most important, SCLC began to train student activists on black college campuses in the South who provided the next wave of protest. This wave did not start at the kitchen tables or the black restaurants where King and his followers had planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, it started at the lunch counter of a five-and-dime store, where the menu ran to hamburgers and grilled cheese or chicken salad sandwiches.
This phase of the fight for equality began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, freshmen from North Carolina's Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), sat down at a Wool-worth's lunch counter at four thirty in the afternoon, requested service, and launched the sit-in movement that would become the tocsin tolling the death knell of the segregated South. The rules of social behavior in the segregated South were complex. Blacks were able to shop in the store and indeed had worked behind the lunch counter serving food; however, they were not able to sit down to eat at the establishment. That was about to change that afternoon when the four young men took their places and simply waited for service while doing their schoolwork. They were not served, although they waited until the shop's closing. The next day, others joined them: students from Bennett College, a black all-girls' school in Greensboro, as well as some whites from the University of North Carolina's Women's College. Although the four had begun their campaign without a mandate from any of the larger Civil Rights or community organizations, their protest quickly galvanized the area, and by the fifth day, there were hundreds of students crowded into the downtown shops, peacefully demanding their rights. The sit-ins galvanized the country, demonstrations were staged in more than one hundred cities in the South and the North, and the lunch counter rapidly became a national symbol of the South's inequalities.
The images of the well-dressed college students quietly sitting and the humiliations that they suffered as they remained impassive and dignified transformed the country, and the campaign soon spread nationwide. Blacks and whites in the North and West picketed large chains that had segregated facilities in the South, while in the South sit-ins spread rapidly to Nashville and Atlanta, where the campaign was broadened to include the desegregation of all public facilities as well as equal access to education and employment. The Greensboro protests ultimately resulted in the desegregation of that city's lunch counters. In Nashville, major restaurants desegregated by May 1960, and the Atlanta protests resulted in the capitulation of the local business and political community in September 1961.
Although many of the leaders of the developing protest movement had been trained in passive resistance by traditional organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC, some younger activists feared that the momentum of the movement would fade. They called for continued nonviolent action but also acknowledged that more militancy might be required. A conference was called from April 15 to 17, 1960, to keep the protests moving forward. Addressing delegates who came from thirteen states and more than fifty different high schools and colleges, Ella Baker, a Shaw University student and an SCLC organizer, reminded them that it was about "more than a Hamburger"-an aptly culinary image for a movement that began with four young college students deciding to sit in for their lunch and their rights. The culture-changing protest was not about the mainstream food that was served at the lunch counters: the sixty-five-cent roast turkey, fifty-cent ham and cheese sandwich, or even about America's totemic apple pie, offered for fifteen cents. It was simply about equality. The sit-ins drew the curtain back from the country's dirty little secret and showed the inequality of American life to the world. Anyone alive during that era can vividly remember the images of the clean-cut young students, the unbridled furor of those who opposed them, and the victory the students won. Food became metaphor for society.
The Civil Rights organizations brought the movement to the daily consciousness of a nation, and gains were won. But it took the Freedom Riders; more boycotts; the murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; a march on Washington, D.C.; the bombing of four little girls in a Birmingham church; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and countless other acts of violence before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The act banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and entertainment facilities, as well as schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and swimming pools. The 1964 act, unlike some that had preceded it, had potential for enforcement, since it mandated that government funds could be withheld from any program that did not comply. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to ensure that there was no longer discrimination in the country based on race, or on color, gender, religion, or country of national origin. The yoke had been lifted, but the battle for full equality was not over by any means.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s was a crucial turning point in the history of African Americans and food: It not only emphasized the importance that food had held within the African American context but also placed the important role that African Americans played in the food of the country front and center. In a memorable photograph of the second day of the Greensboro sit-in, the four young men, Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond, sit at the counter. On the other side of the counter is a server, an African American who seems more than abashed to be placed in such a position. The menu offerings posted on the walls are the simple fast food of a prior generation: sandwiches, plate lunches, and sweet desserts, culinarily nothing worth fighting for. The story is a complex one, unlocking a history of racial interaction in the country. While many Southern whites were content with being served by African Americans who held the job of restaurant cook, home domestic, or lunch counterman, they were not prepared to share their space at the counter or the table with those from whose hands they were served daily. The inherent absurdity of the racial contradiction that for centuries was emblematic of the South resonates in that photo capturing the era's transforming moment.
While the sit-ins were being held in the South, planning activities for civil disobedience around the country took African Americans and their food to a wider audience. Kitchen tables and black restaurants had become, along with churches of all denominations, traditional planning places for the movement. At them, white liberals from the North, who'd traveled to the South for sit-ins and later for Freedom Rides and voter registration and protest marches, got what for many was their first taste of the savory, well-seasoned traditional African American menu. When they returned home, they ventured into black neighborhoods in search of restaurants serving the same dishes and contributed to the mainstream awareness of the traditional black diet. The popularizing of African American traditional foods went hand in hand with a growing pride in race and in self in the African American community.
For the younger generation, the Civil Rights Movement morphed into the Black Power movement, and there was a growing pride in things black and in the culture that had survived enslavement. It went hand in hand with a hunger to learn more about the black experience and a national feeling of solidarity among blacks. In the early 1960s this pride manifested itself in what could be termed a "soul" movement. Much ink has flowed on the origins of the word "soul" as it applies to the African American experience in the United States, and more will almost certainly flow, but the 1960s created a place where for the first time in many lives there was a palpable pride in the uniqueness of the African American experience in the United States. The word "soul" was at first used among blacks to establish a cultural community, as in "soul brother" and "soul sister." It was initially used to denote kinship in the struggle, in much the same way as the terms "brother" and "sister" had been honorifics in the black church for generations. However, as with many other African American cultural innovations, the term was rapidly coopted by the mainstream, and soon there were soul combs on the market along with soul T-shirts, soul hairdos, soul handshakes, and certainly soul music. The term "soul food" harks back to this era, when everything that was black and of the moment had soul, and the word's use signaled a change in attitude toward the food of the African American South.
Soul food has been defined as the traditional African American food of the South as it has been served in black homes and restaurants around the country, but there is wide-ranging disagreement on exactly what that food was. Was it solely the food of the plantation South that was fed to the enslaved: a diet of hog and hominy supplemented with whatever could be hunted or foraged or stolen to relieve its monotony? Was it the traditionally less-noble parts of the pig that were fed to the enslaved, like the chitterlings and hog maws and pigs' feet, the taste for which had been carried to the North by those who left the South in search of jobs? Was it the foods that nourished those who danced at rent parties in Harlem and who went to work in the armament factories during World War II? Was it the fried chicken that was served by the waiter-carriers who hawked their wares at train stations in Virginia or the chicken that was packed in boxes and nourished those who migrated to Kansas and other parts of the West? Was it the smothered pork chop that turned up in the African American restaurants covered in rich brown gravy or the fluffy cornbread that accompanied it?
Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual "How I Got Over," soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disen-franchisement of blacks in the United States. In the 1960s, as the history of African Americans began to be rewritten with pride instead of with the shame that had previously accompanied the experience of disenfranchisement and enslavement, soul food was as much an affirmation as a diet. Eating neckbones and chitterlings, turnip greens and fried chicken, became a political statement for many, and African American restaurants that had existed since the early part of the century were increasingly being patronized not only by blacks but also by those in sympathy with the movement. In the North, those who patronized soul food restaurants also included homesick white Southerners as well as the occasional white liberal who wanted a taste of some of the foods from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
As had often been the case in African American society, there was a culinary class divide that must be acknowledged. At one pole were those whose social aspirations led them to eat dishes that emulated the dietary habits of mainstream America and Europe. At the other were those who consumed what was a more traditional African American diet: one that harked back to the slave foods of the South. In the 1960s, soul food based on the slave diet of hog and hominy became a political statement and was embraced by many middle-class blacks who had previously publicly eschewed it as a relic of a slave past. It became popular and even celebrated.
A look at the cookbooks of the period confirms the enormous impact that the term had on the minds and indeed the palates of many. Most African American cookbooks published prior to the 1960s and in the early part of the decade referenced the plantation South or the historic aspect of the recipes with titles like Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women's (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women's Historical Cookbook of the American Negro Historical Cookbook of the American Negro. Others invoked the name of a well-known local cook or caterer, like Bess Grant's Cook Book Bess Grant's Cook Book, published in Culver City, California, and Lena Richard's eponymous cookbook, published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trend continued through the early 1960s, with such works as His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering, by Frank Bellamy of Roswell, Georgia, and A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, published in Annandale, Virginia.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, soul food had gained a powerful allure, and a tidal wave of cookbooks with "soul food" in the title was unleashed, including Bob Jeffries's Soul Food Cookbook Soul Food Cookbook, Hattie Rinehart Griffin's Soul-Food Cookbook Soul-Food Cookbook, and Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan's Soul Food Cookbook Soul Food Cookbook-all published in 1969. The same year also saw the publication of Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook, by the owner of an East Village restaurant in New York City that had become a mecca for whites who wanted a taste of "authentic" African American cooking.
If the period of the Civil Rights movement began with traditional African American cookbooks extolling the virtues of greens, macaroni and cheese, neckbones, chitterlings, and fried chicken, it ended with a transformation of the diet of many African Americans. By the end of the decade and throughout the 1970s, brown rice, smoked turkey wings, tahini, and tofu also appeared on urban African American tables as signs of gastronomic protest against the traditional diet and its perceived limitations to health and well-being, both real or imagined. One of the reasons was the resurgence of the Nation of Islam.
The Nation of Islam (NOI) originated in the early part of the twentieth century but came to national prominence in the 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that peaceful confrontation was not the only way. In Chicago, Detroit, and other large urban areas, the Nation of Islam offered an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement's civil disobedience, which many felt was unnecessarily docile. It preached an Afro-centric variation of traditional Islam and provided a family-centered culture in which gender roles were clearly defined. Food always played an important role in the work of the Nation. As early as 1945, the NOI had recognized the need for land ownership and also for economic independence and had purchased 145 acres in Michigan. Two years later, it opened a grocery store, a restaurant, and a bakery in Chicago. One of the major tenets of the religion was the eschewing of the behaviors that had been imposed by whites, who were regarded as "blue-eyed devils." Followers abjured their "slave name," frequently taking an X in its place and adopted a strictly regimented way of life that included giving up eating the traditional foods that were fed to the enslaved in the South.
NOI leader Elijah Muhammad was extremely concerned about the dietary habits of African Americans and in 1967 published a dietary manual for his followers titled How to Eat to Live; How to Eat to Live; in 1972 he published another, in 1972 he published another, How to Eat to Live, Book 2 How to Eat to Live, Book 2. As with much about the Nation of Islam, there is considerable contention about Muhammad's ideas and precepts, which are a combination of traditional Islamic proscriptions with an idiosyncratic admixture of prohibitions that seem personally biased. He vehemently opposed the traditional African American diet, or "slave diet," as he called it. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden to Nation of Islam members and pork, in particular, was anathema. Elijah Muhammad enjoined his followers: Do not eat the swine-do not even touch it. Just stop eating the swine flesh and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother's old fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15 minute biscuits made with baking powder. Put yeast in your bread and let it sour and rise and then bake it. Eat and drink to live not to die.
Pork is haram haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-noble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie-a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation's gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner.
Under Elijah Muhammad's leadership and that of his ministers Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam grew into a formidable force in the 1960s and 1970s, gaining numerous members around the country.
The mid-1960s were a time of turbulence and trouble on the national and international fronts. The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy opened a Pandora's box. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated and the Watts riots occurred. In 1967, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out all over the country. The country's racial transformation occurred in an unprecedented clashing of blacks and whites, as blacks increasingly refused to accept what had for centuries been the status quo. A growing awareness of the history of African Americans and the race pride that was the result of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in a quest for more information about the African American experience and of blacks' links around the world with other communities in struggle.
As a result of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, there were a small but growing number of black students enrolled at predominantly white institutions around the country. Their increasing numbers, which rose 100 percent between 1950 and 1969, led to the call for black studies, and in 1968, San Francisco State College became the first institution of higher learning in the country to establish a black studies department. The institutionalized study of the history of African Americans went hand in hand with the growth of a cultural nationalism movement that celebrated African American culture in all realms and contributed to an increasing awareness of an African world, as a greater number of African Americans began to have an international approach.
This international approach gained increasing importance as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Brown vs. Board of Education decision not only galvanized those in the United States but also served as a rallying cry to others around the world in countries where people of color were living under colonialism and imperialism. The battles won and the methods used in the United States provided a road map to independence for many. Indeed, many of those who became leaders in the independence movements in the Caribbean and on the African continent had been students in the United States. If the 1960 photograph of four young men sitting at a lunch counter sums up the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, a 1957 photograph of the duchess of Kent dancing with a kente-cloth-clad Kwame Nkrumah at the independence celebrations for Ghana visually codified the opening of the African movement toward independence. decision not only galvanized those in the United States but also served as a rallying cry to others around the world in countries where people of color were living under colonialism and imperialism. The battles won and the methods used in the United States provided a road map to independence for many. Indeed, many of those who became leaders in the independence movements in the Caribbean and on the African continent had been students in the United States. If the 1960 photograph of four young men sitting at a lunch counter sums up the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, a 1957 photograph of the duchess of Kent dancing with a kente-cloth-clad Kwame Nkrumah at the independence celebrations for Ghana visually codified the opening of the African movement toward independence.
Fights for basic civil rights in the United States paralleled those in the Caribbean and on the African continent, where the battle for autonomy and the ability to govern their own countries continued through the 1960s. The dates of independence for African and Caribbean nations resonate alongside the dates of gains in the march toward full equality for African Americans. The litany of independence days began with the 1957 independence for Ghana, the former British colony along the Gold Coast, and the turbulent 1958 independence of Guinea from France. The year 1960 marked a raft of independences for former French colonies, as Senegal, Ivory Coast, Chad, Gabon, Mali, Madagascar, Niger, Togo, Benin, and Upper Volta hauled down the tricolor and proudly hoisted their own flags. The same year, Nigeria gained independence from Britain. The map was gradually transformed from British imperial pink and French imperial turquoise into a raft of new nations. Africans, Caribbean peoples, and African Americans looked at one another across political divides and cultural contradictions and recognized that an international community was being born.
One of the ways that they all connected across cultural divide was food. As a growing number of cultural nationalists began to travel and visit other countries where people of African descent lived, they brought back recipes for dishes that were added to menus and to festivities. While the Harlem of the 1920s saw street vendors selling plantains and the root vegetables that are traditional in the foods of Africa and the Caribbean, in the intervening years they had largely disappeared from African American markets. By the 1960s, true yams, eddoes, tania eddoes, tania, and dasheen had been relegated to neighborhoods around the country with predominantly West Indian and African populations-neighborhoods that existed because the 1965 Immigration Act had relaxed quotas, opened the American borders to a wider number of immigrants, and allowed for greater immigration from far-reaching areas of the African world.
The mid-1960s were a time of increasing internationalism and growing awareness of self in the African American community. The creation of the holiday Kwanzaa by cultural nationalist and black studies advocate Ron "Maulana" Karenga in 1966 marked another turning point. Using a traditional East African harvest festival as inspiration, Karenga created a nonreligious seven-day celebration rich in ritual that's designed to uplift and unify African Americans. The year-end holiday is rooted in the nguzu saba nguzu saba, or seven principles, Karenga created to extol the virtues of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. In keeping with its Pan-African inspiration, Kwanzaa uses Swahili (the language of African unity) as its official language. There are no culinary expectations for the holiday, like the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas goose, but Kwanzaa's seven nights of ritual make symbolic use of food throughout: ears of Native American corn are placed on Kwanzaa tables to represent the children in each household, and a basket of fruit symbolizing abundance is an integral part of the traditional centerpiece.
The final day of Kwanzaa, which falls on New Year's Day, is given over to the Karamu festival and designed to celebrate African American communities past and present by honoring African American elders and community leaders as well as African and African American ancestors. The day is traditionally capped by a communal meal with people bringing dishes created from family recipes or foods from around the African Diaspora. Karenga's writings do not offer recipes, but dishes such as Kawaida rice, a vegetable-rich brown rice, became traditional to those who celebrated with him in the holiday's early years. Kwanzaa celebrations around the country include dishes from the African continent, the Caribbean region, and even South America, as well as sweet potato pie, fried chicken, greens, and other traditional specialties of the African American South.
Increasing numbers of African Americans chose to celebrate Kwanzaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a growing awareness of their own African roots. The Peace Corps and continuing missionary work by churches black and white sent African Americans to the African continent, resulting in more widespread knowledge of the African Diaspora and expanded gastronomic horizons, and contributed to a growing sense of shared culinary underpinning. In larger cities and college towns, dishes of West African jollof jollof rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites. rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites.
Then, in 1977, the publication of the autobiography of writer Alex Haley, Roots Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries based on it transformed the way many African Americans thought of themselves and of Africa. Blacks were galvanized by Roots Roots, and large numbers made pilgrimages to the African continent with hopes of discovering their own ancestral origins. (Coinciding with the release of the television miniseries, a travel organization began to offer trips to Dakar, Senegal, for $299, a price that was affordable for many who might otherwise never have traveled to the continent.) They boarded the planes by the hundreds and on the other side of the Atlantic found myriad connections between African American culture and that of the motherland. One major connection they discovered was West Africa's food. They visited markets and recognized items that had for centuries been associated with African American life: okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. They tasted foods that had familiar savors and learned new ways to prepare staples of the African American diet like peanuts, hot chilies, and leafy greens. In Senegal, they tasted the onion-and-lemon-flavored chicken yassa yassa and the national rice-and-fish dish, and the national rice-and-fish dish, thieboudiennse; thieboudiennse; in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an akara akara. African Americans began to taste the culinary connections between foods they knew and those of the western section of the African continent.
This new knowledge found its way to a larger public, as the avant garde of African American cookbook authors took a more international approach and reflected a sense of the African Diaspora in their work. Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor, and The African Heritage Cookbook The African Heritage Cookbook, by Helen Mendes, look at the traditional foods not just of the American South but also of an international African culinary diaspora and contain recipes for dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean as well as traditional Southern ones.
Africa, its diaspora, and their foods, though, were only a part of the expanding African American culinary paradigm; cookbooks of the period also evidence wider-ranging African American attitudes about what to eat and how to eat, like 1974's Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature, by the eponymous comedian, and 1976's Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook, by Mary Keyes Burgess of Santa Barbara, California. The traditional foods of the South were still being written about in works like Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family, by Norma Jean and Carole Darden. Using genealogical research that had been popularized by Roots Roots as well as recipe and memoir, the Darden sisters crafted a 1978 cookbook that tells the story of their family through food. It also tells of the diversity of African American food. as well as recipe and memoir, the Darden sisters crafted a 1978 cookbook that tells the story of their family through food. It also tells of the diversity of African American food.
Up until the 1970s, the food of African Americans could be loosely categorized by class. The upper classes ate a more European-inspired diet, while the underclass consumed a diet evolved from the slave foods of the plantation South. Regional differences played a lesser role. The South always took primacy of place at the table, but those living in the North and West also had their own dietary habits, like a predilection for potatoes instead of rice or an affinity for beef instead of the more traditional pork.
The 1970s, however, exploded all hypotheses. Certainly many African Americans still clung to the traditional foods of the South. However, after the decades of Civil Rights gains and with the growing awareness of the African continent and its diaspora, increasing numbers of blacks of all classes throughout the nation began eating a diet that was widely varied and reflected a newly discovered pride in African roots and international connections. The African American diet of this era was one that continued to celebrate the traditional foods; it also encompassed the vegetarianism espoused by Dick Gregory, allowed for the dietary concerns of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, reflected the international diversity of the African Diaspora, and even acknowledged the culinary trends of the time. In short, in the 1970s, the food of African Americans began to evolve into a cuisine that honored hog maws and collard greens and yet allowed for West African foufou, Caribbean callaloo, brown rice, and even tahini. Just as Rosa Parks's sitting down on a Montgomery bus changed the face of public America, civil rights workers at kitchen tables, black restaurants in urban enclaves, and four students at a North Carolina lunch counter transformed the African American foodscape and brought it out of isolation. Black food in its increasing diversity was no longer segregated on the blacks-only side of the menu, but squarely placed on the American table.
YOU WERE WHAT YOU ATE: FOOD AS POLITICS.
The 1970s were a time of political consciousness on all fronts. How one dressed-dashiki or three-piece suit or shirt jacket-subtly advertised a point of view. For women, long skirts or short, afro or straightened hair all took on great significance. How one ate was equally fraught with political subtext, and a meal with friends of differing political stripes could be transformed into a minefield of culinary dos and don'ts.
Members of the Nation of Islam were identified by their bow ties and their well-pressed suits. They were also recognized by their diet, which was without any hint of swine. It was a highly codified regimen with foods that, although they were considered healthier than the newly named "soul food," retained some aspects of the traditional African American taste profile-sugary desserts and well-cooked vegetables. There was no alcohol to be seen, and dessert was more often than not a bean pie-one of the religion's hallmarks.
Dashiki-clad cultural nationalists ate a diet that was multicultural and infused with international flavor. The calabashes and carved wooden bowls that appeared on their batik tablecloths were likely to be filled with dishes like the spicy jollof jollof rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as callaloo callaloo from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables. from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables.
The upwardly mobile bourgeoisie continued to dine on Eurocentric foods and to emulate the culinary styles that James Beard, Julia Child, and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, were bringing to the television sets weekly. Beef bourguignonne, beef Wellington, and cheese fondue were party standbys. In the privacy of their homes or those of their friends, they might indulge in some chitterlings or a slice of watermelon, but unless done to evidence culinary solidarity with others, it was not their public position.
The classic foods of the African American South-stewed okra and butter beans, pork chops and fried chicken-maintained their place at the table as well. These were the foods of rural Southerners and those Northerners and activists who wished to signal their solidarity with the more traditional arm of the Civil Rights Movement. For some, they remained the daily dietary mainstays; but for most, they evolved into the celebration food of family reunions and Sunday dinners.
Those with no special allegiance to any one faction ate what they wished or whatever was placed in front of them. Their tables might groan under a meal of Southern fried chicken and Caribbean rice and peas or be set with the finest family china upon which would be placed chitterlings and a mess of greens. The gastronomically flexible developed a chameleonlike ability to change with the prevailing culinary trend and political view.
By the end of the 1970s, food, like all aspects of African American life, had become a battleground for identity. The period's multiplicity of gastronomic and political positions and their dietary
CHAPTER 10.
WE ARE THE WORLD.
Making It in an Expanding Black World and Joining an Unbroken African Culinary Circle
Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York- I have lived in this neighborhood for more than twenty years. Labeled one of the country's African American ghettos in the turbulent 1960s, Bedford Stuyvesant benefited from an infusion of money and interest generated by Bobby Kennedy's championing of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which boosted African American home ownership and encouraged black enterprise in the community. I arrived a decade or so too late for the first wave of subsidized housing and the community spirit that it engendered; I was lured from my Greenwich Village apartment and my "That Girl" urban life by a brick row house. With a unique open floor plan and ample room for entertaining, the house struck me as a quirky place with loads of room for my thousands of cookbooks and my ever-growing collections. The neighborhood was in transition, but I hoped that with my "protective coloration" I'd be able to navigate the changes from Manhattan living without too much difficulty.
Little did I realize that I was spoiled. By the time I made my transition to Brooklyn life, I had written two cookbooks and was a food lover of the first order. I, like many other foodies-as we would later be called-had my culinary epiphany in France, where I'd lived for two years. In the Village, I was used to the abundant fresh produce at Balducci's, around the corner from my apartment, and the meat counter at Jefferson Market, which was a bit beyond that, as well as the atmospheric French butcher shop on my corner that sold tiny lamb chops and beautiful packages of freshly made pate and seemed transported from the Left Bank.
In my new neighborhood supermarket, I was confronted by less-than-pristine vegetables, and mainly the basics-greens, turnips, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and onions. There were no mushrooms, no fancy lettuces, no haricots verts. Salad meant iceberg lettuce, and for fruit I had a choice among apples, bananas, oranges, and the occasional pitiful-looking pear. Gone were seasonal treats like fresh raspberries in the summer and asparagus in the spring. (I knew better than to even think I'd spot a fiddlehead fern or a Jerusalem artichoke.) The meat counter was equally disappointing: There mostly were pork and chicken products and steaks that always seemed to be too thinly sliced. There was no lamb in sight, but customers were offered instead an assortment of nitrite-filled prepackaged luncheon meats. There were aisles and aisles of canned vegetables, packaged foods, sugary cereals, and fruit drinks containing little fruit juice. The real surprise was that the food cost as much or more than it did in the finest shops in Manhattan! The restaurant options were equally limited. Yes, the fish market offered delicious fried-fish sandwiches and there was a West Indian deli, but aside from Chinese takeout, there were three possibilities: McDonald's, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was my first real acquaintance with America's culinary apartheid. Long before the term "food justice" became common currency, I rapidly learned that African Americans and indeed all who shop in ghettoized areas out of the mainstream were being offered second-rate comestibles sold at first-class prices and fast-foot joints. We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats, and second-or third-rate produce. It was a lesson I will not forget.
However, it was not all grim; there were advantages to Bed Stuy as well. I was heartened by the families who lived next door and the villagelike atmosphere on Fulton Street, two blocks away. I liked the fact that on summer weekends a gentleman would park his car across from my house, open the trunk, and sell watermelons; and I loved his sign, which read WATERMELON SWEET LIKE YOUR WOMAN. WATERMELON SWEET LIKE YOUR WOMAN.It was a place that reminded me of the 1950s, when I'd grown up, more than the 1980s.
When I lived in the Village, I had to journey uptown to Harlem whenever I felt like some collard greens or when I wanted black-eyed peas for the Hoppin' John deemed necessary to start the New Year off right, not only by me but also by most of Harlem, black Americans everywhere, and many white Southerners. In Brooklyn, there was no such difficulty; my local supermarket sold these African American staples year-round, and the greengrocer offered African American Southern seasonal specialties like raw peanuts. What the greengrocers lacked could be found on the back of trucks parked on Atlantic Avenue, where enterprising men hauled sausages, greens, sweet potatoes, and more up from North Carolina and did thriving business selling to those who still craved the foods of their Southern homes. The neighborhood was also home to a large West Indian population, so alongside the basic American produce, the local greengrocer also had dasheen, plantains, mangoes (in season), and a wide variety of root vegetables -eddoes -eddoes, yams, cassava-as well as shelves of Trinidadian curry powder, Barbadian brown sugar, and vats of salted codfish and pickled pigs' tails. There were small containers at the checkout counter filled with the fresh thyme sprigs and the Scotch bonnet chilies that are essential to much of the food of the Caribbean world. What was exotic in other parts of the city became everyday for me.
In the twenty-plus years I've lived in my neighborhood, I have watched as the place and my supermarket changed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, my neighborhood has gentrified but not so much that it's not still an African American neighborhood-at least for the next few years. The foodscape, however, is evolving rapidly. I can now get Chinese, Indian, and Japanese food delivered. A burgeoning Senegalese neighborhood has grown up around a mosque and is home to several small restaurants selling thieboudi-enne thieboudi-enne and chicken yassa to taxi drivers and adventurous locals. Folks even proudly boast of the Applebee's restaurant that opened a few years back. My supermarket as well has taken on a new look. The abundance of pork and chicken products is still there, as are the thin steaks, but the new dietary habits of African Americans and the upward mobility of the neighborhood are reflected in the goods sold. The produce counter now offers an abundance of fresh salads: arugula, mesclun, baby spinach, and spring mixes alongside the collards, dasheen, and kale. I can even find sun-dried tomatoes and haricots verts. A bakery purveys freshly baked croissants and pound cakes as well as bagels. I can find flour tortillas and wraps for spring rolls as well as wheatgrass health potions and tahini. The shelves still have their sugary cereals and canned foods, but they also display Greek yogurt, soy milk, and even tofu. and chicken yassa to taxi drivers and adventurous locals. Folks even proudly boast of the Applebee's restaurant that opened a few years back. My supermarket as well has taken on a new look. The abundance of pork and chicken products is still there, as are the thin steaks, but the new dietary habits of African Americans and the upward mobility of the neighborhood are reflected in the goods sold. The produce counter now offers an abundance of fresh salads: arugula, mesclun, baby spinach, and spring mixes alongside the collards, dasheen, and kale. I can even find sun-dried tomatoes and haricots verts. A bakery purveys freshly baked croissants and pound cakes as well as bagels. I can find flour tortillas and wraps for spring rolls as well as wheatgrass health potions and tahini. The shelves still have their sugary cereals and canned foods, but they also display Greek yogurt, soy milk, and even tofu.
The changes in my neighborhood supermarket reflect, more than anything, the transformation of the African American diet in the final years of the twentieth century and the opening ones of the twenty-first. The traditional Southern diet of pig and corn is still consumed, but increasingly it has become celebration food for many families, eaten only on Sundays, on holidays, and at family reunions. The black middle class continues to increase, and upwardly mobile African Americans eat more widely ranging foods. The culinary explorations of the 1960s have added dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean to the menu.
There has also been an expansion of the black world. The designation "black American" no longer means up from the South. It can also encompass folks from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the African continent itself. All brought recipes from their homelands to enrich the mix. These dishes supplemented the traditional Southern specialties and the recipes that blacks and the rest of the country received weekly from television shows with stars like Julia Child and Graham Kerr. At an African American party today it is possible to find the fried bean fritters from Brazil known as acaraje acaraje served along with Jamaican meat patties or the Trinida-dian roasted chickpeas called served along with Jamaican meat patties or the Trinida-dian roasted chickpeas called channa channa that originated in India or, yes, fried chicken and a mess of greens. Beverages might include Senegalese that originated in India or, yes, fried chicken and a mess of greens. Beverages might include Senegalese bissap rouge bissap rouge, Southern mint julep featuring top-shelf bourbon, Guyanese rum and ginger ale, or a mellow California merlot. The choices and the range of food are limited only by the imagination. At the dinner table in the twenty-first century, African Americans, like the rest the country, are culinary omnivores, and we can truly say that, on the table, we eat the world.
By the end of the 1970s it seemed as though the major battles engaged for centuries were winding down, if not completely won, and that the seeds of full equality long planted had finally sprouted. Black people had moved forward, but there were still hurdles to surmount and gains to be made. Despite their conservative agendas, President Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, placed blacks in their administration's in high positions. Blacks continued to make political gains on the local and state levels as well. In 1964, there were only 103 black elected officials nationwide; by 1994, there were nearly 8,500, and blacks were mayors of four hundred U.S. cities, including New York and Washington, D.C. Political activist Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 on a platform that united the concerns of blacks with those of poor whites and other minorities. His Rainbow Coalition was built on grassroots strategies he learned working with Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement. He lost in 1984, but made a decent showing, and when he ran for president a second time, in 1987, he garnered one third of all the votes cast in the Democratic presidential primaries.
Black gains were not just on the political front. African Americans made strides in business, in sports, and in many other fields of endeavor. Black magazines like Essence Essence and and Black Enterprise Black Enterprise followed the trail blazed by John Johnson and counterpointed the other publications' headlines about unemployment and familial dysfunction by presenting successful blacks from all walks of life to readers both black and white. They offered articles on the new entrepreneurship, book reviews, social commentary, in-depth interviews of black writers, artists, and businesspeople, as well as sections on travel and on wine and food. The latter were obligatory, for the country had changed as well. In the 1960s it underwent a culinary revolution with television chefs like James Beard and Julia Child. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, food had become one of the country's central cultural forces. followed the trail blazed by John Johnson and counterpointed the other publications' headlines about unemployment and familial dysfunction by presenting successful blacks from all walks of life to readers both black and white. They offered articles on the new entrepreneurship, book reviews, social commentary, in-depth interviews of black writers, artists, and businesspeople, as well as sections on travel and on wine and food. The latter were obligatory, for the country had changed as well. In the 1960s it underwent a culinary revolution with television chefs like James Beard and Julia Child. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, food had become one of the country's central cultural forces.
Ironically, the food that was increasingly on the country's mind was for the most part neither fresh nor always nourishing; it was readily available and cheap. As women joined the workplace in record numbers in this period, food became a matter of convenience. Breakfast could be purchased at McDonald's, lunch at Burger King, and dinner brought home from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Family life also changed in the 1980s, and increasingly Americans lived in single-family households that survived on processed or fast foods. Even in households where the nuclear family still held sway, family dinnertime was becoming a thing of the past. Differing household schedules meant that individuals grabbed whatever they could and ate on their own timetable while watching television or chatting on the telephone or engaged in other pursuits. Often what they grabbed was fast food; in 1993 alone, Americans ate twenty-nine billion hamburgers! Fast-food chains expanded, as did the waistlines of average Americans. Obesity, not surprisingly, became a growing concern of the supersized country, and reports from the American Medical Association regarding cholesterol levels and the health hazards of eating junk food raised alarm. The poor and the working classes, like those in my Brooklyn neighborhood, were growing fat and unhealthy on genetically engineered foods, processed foods, and fast-food meals.
On the other side of the culinary divide, the country's elite celebrated with lavish meals in over-the-top restaurants, which proliferated. Wealthy diners around the country savored a new American cuisine inspired by regional dishes. America became one of the world's dining destinations, with San Francisco and New York City developing into much-visited dining meccas. New American cuisine became the watchword, and American chefs like Larry Forgione in New York, Jasper White in Boston, Mark Miller in Santa Fe, and Alice Waters in Berkeley, California, championed the flavors of the country's regional cuisines. They served them up to the top tier of the public in a nation that spent almost one third of its food dollars on restaurant meals, whether upscale or down. Those who only watched the lifestyles of the rich and famous on their television sets attempted to duplicate the same meals in increasingly elaborate home kitchens using one of the thousand cookbooks that were published every year. Others simply sat down in front of their television sets, tuned into one of the rapidly multiplying cooking shows, and munched away on their hamburgers or Kentucky Fried while dreaming of other fare.
Americans on all ends of the social spectrum became enthralled by a cadre of celebrity chefs: cooks who made fortunes from food. However, African Americans who had toiled in homes and restaurants since the origins of the country were once again on the fringes of the new bonanza. One who almost made it was an earnest twenty-five-year-old black chef who created nouvelle cuisine dishes at a downtown Manhattan bistro known as Odeon. Patrick Clark came to popular attention in the 1980s. He was fiercely dedicated to his profession and wildly enthusiastic; with the zeal and wonder of the youngster he was, he could and did talk about his culinary ideas for hours.
Clark was a second-generation chef whose father had cooked for the Restaurant Associates group in an era when blacks worked hard but garnered little fame. At home, he'd grown up on traditional Southern specialties like smothered pork chops and fried chicken, but he also had been introduced to more-omnivorous fare through his father's profession. He trained at New York City Technical College and apprenticed at Eugenie-les-Bains, France, under Michel Guerard, one of the originators of cuisine minceur cuisine minceur (the diet branch of nouvelle cuisine). As a classically trained black chef with an exceptional culinary pedigree, he was poised to enjoy the benefits of fame and fortune. (the diet branch of nouvelle cuisine). As a classically trained black chef with an exceptional culinary pedigree, he was poised to enjoy the benefits of fame and fortune.
Clark arrived on the New York restaurant scene when fine dining was the social pastime of the well-to do and the city abounded with pricey restaurants purveying all manner of food. In Odeon's first review he was awarded two stars by the New York Times New York Times. He soon became one of the city's most revered chefs and expanded his culinary repertoire subtly, adding some of the Southern tastes of his African American world to the regional cuisines of America that were being rediscovered by chefs around the country. Clark's culinary realm grew, and by the mid-1980s he was appointed chef at Cafe Luxembourg, a second restaurant opened by Odeon owner Keith McNally.
Although lauded by his peers and praised in the media, Clark wanted the single sign of success that other chefs enjoyed: his own establishment. By 1988, he had found backers and was able to open his own restaurant, Metro, a lavish endeavor. Unfortunately, it opened right after the stock market crash of 1987. Metro was created for the high-flying 1980s, with stratospheric prices and equally elevated overhead. In the new economy, it was doomed; Clark closed it in 1990. He then moved to Los Angeles and became executive chef at Bice, an Italian restaurant. But the celebrity culture of the city and its finicky dining ethos did not suit Clark's temperament, and after a two-year sojourn he returned to the East Coast, this time to Washington, D.C. There he became chef at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the Clintons were frequent diners. By the spring of 1994, upon the retirement of White House chef Pierre Chambrin, Clark's name was on the short list to become the Clintons' White House chef. Clark, who would have been the first official African American White House chef, demurred. Activists and civil rights leaders, aware of the honor that went with the request, were saddened by his refusal of the post, but Clark stood firm, citing loyalty to the Hay-Adams and wariness about the loss of personal identity and creative flexibility that came with the job, despite its prestige. In 1995, though, Clark left the Hay-Adams and returned to New York, where he became the chef at Tavern on the Green. Clark's promise was never fully attained. He died in 1998 from congestive heart failure at forty-two.
It was a shock from which the black culinary world is still recovering, because although blacks had been cooking for the white elite for centuries, Clark was the first black who seemed poised to enter the high-flying realm of twentieth-century superstar chefs. Although aware of the honor, Clark did not want to be categorized by race. "I consider myself a chef. The press has considered me a prominent black chef," he boldly stated. He remained, however, keenly aware of his roots and his past. At Tavern on the Green, he installed the first barbecue grill and added items to the menu inspired by the classic African American Southern tastes he'd learned at his family's table. More important, Clark also spent much of his free time mentoring young black culinary students and working with different organizations to raise funds for scholarships for them. The brevity of his life, cut short in the prime of his career, deprived him of several of the accolades received subsequently by his peers. Patrick Clark's true renown came from the respect in which he was held by fellow chefs, from the delight of diners who ate at the various restaurants where he cooked, and from the ongoing admiration of a new generation of young black chefs for whom he became the "north star."
Clark was a superstar chef yet spent most of his career working at establishments owned by others. The harsh reality was that even in the high-flying 1990s, restaurant ownership was difficult: Costs were prohibitive; backers were difficult to find; and banks were usually leery of loaning to African American chefs, who were still thought to know only how to prepare food from the classic Southern black repertoire. It required more than the creative entrepre-neurship of Thomas Downing or Barney Ford to open a restaurant in the 1990s. It seemed that the days when blacks gained fame and fortune through food had ended just at the point when the culinary realm became a profession of honor and not a service job.
Then, in 1994, New York New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene wrote an article titled "Soul Food Now," which signaled the next step for the diverse traditions of African American food. Ironically, the three seminal voices of African American food of the period were women who had started their culinary journeys decades earlier: Edna Lewis in New York, South Carolina, and Georgia; Sylvia Woods in New York; and Leah Chase in New Orleans. magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene wrote an article titled "Soul Food Now," which signaled the next step for the diverse traditions of African American food. Ironically, the three seminal voices of African American food of the period were women who had started their culinary journeys decades earlier: Edna Lewis in New York, South Carolina, and Georgia; Sylvia Woods in New York; and Leah Chase in New Orleans.
Edna Lewis was a quiet woman from Virginia whose regal bearing and uncompromising insistence on fresh ingredients and optimum taste made her the doyenne of fin de siecle African American food. It might seem odd that a superstar of the 1990s was born in 1916, in Freetown, Virginia, and was the granddaughter of an emancipated slave. But although Lewis's culinary career began much earlier, she reached the heights of her profession in the 1990s. As a child in Freetown, she was entranced by the flavors of the foods that she and her relatives had grown and harvested, and her taste memories of those meals informed her cooking decades later. Lewis said: "As a child, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up I didn't think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try to recapture those good flavors of the past." Lewis moved to New York at age sixteen and held a variety of jobs until she found her calling in 1949, when she became the cook at a small clublike restaurant in Manhattan called Cafe Nicholson. The restaurant, opened by antiques dealer John Nicholson, became a gathering spot for the bohemians of the day and soon "Miss Edna" was cooking her fresh-tasting honest country food for Tennessee Williams, Diana Vreeland, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, and other members of the literati of the period.
As had many others before her, Lewis made her fame preparing food for whites in a setting where few if any blacks ventured. But while she might serve deceptively simple roast chicken, lemony-dressed salads of Boston lettuce, Gallic mussels with herbed rice, or cheese souffles, the food that she cooked was always inspired by the country tastes of her Virginia home, demanded fresh ingredients, and used time-honed culinary skills. Lewis left Cafe Nicholson in the 1950s and cooked professionally at a number of other places. She gradually slipped from the growing culinary mainstream. Instead, she wrote, worked at the Museum of Natural History, and became a fixture at Manhattan's annual Ninth Avenue Street Festival, an early celebration of the diversity of the city's food. Food, though, was always a driving passion, and by the 1970s Lewis could add cookbook author to her resume; her Edna Lewis Cookbook Edna Lewis Cookbook was published in 1972, followed by was published in 1972, followed by A Taste of Country Cooking A Taste of Country Cooking in 1976 and in 1976 and The Pursuit of Flavor The Pursuit of Flavor in 1988. Each extolled the virtues of the fresh, seasonal ingredients that she had always championed. in 1988. Each extolled the virtues of the fresh, seasonal ingredients that she had always championed.
Lewis, although long known to the culinary cognoscenti, joined the ranks of the gastronomic superstars in the 1990s, when she was lured out of retirement and named chef at Gage and Tollner, a venerable Brooklyn eatery. There, in the gaslit restaurant, which dated to the last decades of the nineteenth century, Lewis again wowed New Yorkers with her delicate hand with cornbread and biscuits and her deft way with the pickles and condiments that are such a part of the Southern table.
By the mid-1990s Lewis left New York, but she continued to cook, first in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then at Middleton Place Plantation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. At each spot, her insistence on fresh ingredients simply prepared remained primary. Throughout the 1990s and virtually until her death, in 2006, Lewis became a culinary fixture, always speaking with quiet authority With her African-fabric dresses and her regal bearing, she garnered accolades and awards and became one of the most visible African American chefs. For years, she journeyed only by train, preferring the pace of the era of her birth to that in which she was widely acclaimed. In her later years, Lewis found an apprentice and soul mate in Scott Peacock, a young Southern white chef, and controversially, they lived together, cooked together, and collaborated on her last book, The Gift of Southern Cooking The Gift of Southern Cooking, a work that attempts to bridge the divide between the differing styles of black cooking and white cooking in the South. Lewis's food represented one facet of the African American culinary repertoire-one that emphasizes the freshest-available local ingredients and the studied preparation of simple foods. A soul food resurgence brought the traditional diet back to tables, and later the neo-soul movement would join both tendencies.
For much of the twentieth century, virtually every city in the United States large enough to have an inner city had its "soul food" restaurant. These black-owned restaurants still occupied pride of place in black neighborhoods, where they flourished and became thriving businesses, bringing their owners fame and increased fortune in the mid-to late 1990s. Many of them were survivors of the initial wave of black-owned restaurants that prospered and became icons in their communities during the period of the Great Migration and during the Civil Rights Movement. They all offered a taste of traditional foods: cornbread on the table in the bread basket, hot biscuits with breakfast, and a tall thin bottle of hot sauce among the table condiments.
Sylvia's in Harlem was one of these restaurants. Known to Har-lemites for decades-along with other soul food places that have now disappeared, like Wells and Copeland's-it came to new fame in the 1990s and today is arguably the best-known soul food restaurant in the world. Like Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods is an atavism-a survivor of another generation whose career has found new vigor in the twenty-first century. Sylvia Woods, the self-proclaimed "Queen of Soul Food," opened Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem in the turbulent decades of the Civil Rights Movement. In a classic tale of black entrepreneurial success that mirrored those of black culinary entrepreneurs of earlier times, Sylvia worked her way from waitress to luncheonette owner to restaurateur to tycoon. It all began in 1954, when she was informed of a job at a local eatery. Sylvia's willingness to work hard, her eight years' tenure in the job, and a bad investment by the luncheonette's owner resulted in her being offered ownership of the spot, which originally consisted of a counter and a few booths.
In 1962, Sylvia's opened, serving the traditional pork and greens, cornbread, and fried catfish of the American South. It flourished and became a Harlem landmark. After a mention by New York New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, it became the African American restaurant best known by tourists and visitors from as far afield as Brazil and Japan. Even today, tour buses disgorge groups by the hundreds to sample her African American meals. Especially lively are Sundays when a gospel brunch combines African American breakfast foods like grits and sausages with the rousing music of the black church; the place is packed not only with camera be-draped tourists looking for a taste of African American culture but also with Harlem natives, who remain loyal. All are served a menu featuring greens and pork chops, fried chicken and cornbread, all the totems of African American food. magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, it became the African American restaurant best known by tourists and visitors from as far afield as Brazil and Japan. Even today, tour buses disgorge groups by the hundreds to sample her African American meals. Especially lively are Sundays when a gospel brunch combines African American breakfast foods like grits and sausages with the rousing music of the black church; the place is packed not only with camera be-draped tourists looking for a taste of African American culture but also with Harlem natives, who remain loyal. All are served a menu featuring greens and pork chops, fried chicken and cornbread, all the totems of African American food.
Leveraging the fame conferred by Greene and other journalists, the diminutive Woods became the symbol of soul food to much of America, yet no one was more surprised at her success than she. But successful she is. Her face, topped with a chef's toque, now appears on a line of Sylvia's products, like canned black-eyed peas and collard greens, that is available at supermarkets around the country. Today, the booming enterprise includes not only the Harlem restaurant and the nationwide line of Sylvia's Food Products, but also a full-service catering hall and several cookbooks.
If Sylvia Woods is the "Queen of Soul Food" in New York City, Leah Chase is New Orleans's "Empress of Creole Cuisine." Like Woods, Chase is a country girl and a survivor of another era. She too journeyed to the big city and found a job working in food service. But there their stories diverge, for Chase met and married musician Edgar "Dooky" Chase II, whose parents owned an eatery that catered to local patrons in the black Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Chase envisioned a larger, more formal place like the white establishment in which she had worked in the French Quarter. She initially transformed the menu, expanding it from offering only sandwiches to serving hot meals at lunchtime to black men who were beginning to work in offices as the city was gradually being desegregated. She started out as a hostess, but soon she was redecorating the restaurant and eventually began working as chef. Five decades later, white-haired and feisty, she is still in the kitchen, and Dooky Chase restaurant (still a family-run endeavor) has grown into a New Orleans landmark. Chase has served Republican and Democratic presidents and has seen the notable and the notorious come to her art-filled establishment in Treme to sample mamere's mamere's crab soup and other dishes. Although gifted with great culinary curiosity and also an innovative cook, Chase is also a traditionalist. On Mondays there will always be red beans and rice; there will be fish on Fridays. Once a year, on Holy Thursday, there will be a crowd for the bowl of gumbo-z'herbes, a creole Lenten creation made from an odd number (nine, eleven, or thirteen) of greens-some store-bought, like collards and kale; some foraged, like sourgrass-that are prepared with sausage and ham. Dooky Chase celebrates Creole cooking, and the menu reveals some of the sophistication and culinary diversity of African American culture. It offers not only fried catfish and peach cobbler but also such uniquely creole New Orleans dishes as grits and grillades, seafood and okra gumbo, and jambalaya. crab soup and other dishes. Although gifted with great culinary curiosity and also an innovative cook, Chase is also a traditionalist. On Mondays there will always be red beans and rice; there will be fish on Fridays. Once a year, on Holy Thursday, there will be a crowd for the bowl of gumbo-z'herbes, a creole Lenten creation made from an odd number (nine, eleven, or thirteen) of greens-some store-bought, like collards and kale; some foraged, like sourgrass-that are prepared with sausage and ham. Dooky Chase celebrates Creole cooking, and the menu reveals some of the sophistication and culinary diversity of African American culture. It offers not only fried catfish and peach cobbler but also such uniquely creole New Orleans dishes as grits and grillades, seafood and okra gumbo, and jambalaya.
Sylvia's and Dooky Chase's continue to be successful, but by the last decades of the twentieth century, many of the other classic soul food eateries were forced to shut their doors. Health concerns about the high-fat, high-calorie traditional African American diet, rising rents brought about by gentrification, and an ignorance of the true tastes of traditional African American foods among a generation raised on fast food signaled their death knell. Then, in 1997 Cooking Light Cooking Light magazine named soul food one of the culinary trends to watch, and the neo-soul movement that had been percolating quietly got fully underway. Soon upscale dining spots serving improvisations on traditional African American fare-like Los Angeles's Georgia and Hartford, Connecticut's Savannah-flourished. magazine named soul food one of the culinary trends to watch, and the neo-soul movement that had been percolating quietly got fully underway. Soon upscale dining spots serving improvisations on traditional African American fare-like Los Angeles's Georgia and Hartford, Connecticut's Savannah-flourished. Satisfy Your Soul Satisfy Your Soul, a guide to African American, African, and Caribbean restaurants published the same year listed more than 250 around the country. New York was the culinary epicenter and featured numerous upscale black restaurants outside Harlem, many of them owned by famous blacks, like Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs' Justin's and singers Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson's Sugar Bar. There was a range of others-like the Motown Cafe, Soul Cafe, Mekka, and the Shark Bar-where newly affluent "buppies" (black upwardly mobile professionals) met after work to drink and mix. The neo-soul restaurants traded on African American nostalgia for the traditional foods of the past, but each added a nod to changing culinary conventions and the health concerns of the day. They showcased African American culinary innovations and were an incubator for a new wave of culinary entrepreneurs.
One of the precursors of the trend was owned by former model B. Smith, who opened her eponymous restaurant on the edge of New York's theater district in 1986. It was a gamble, but the place rapidly became a hangout for black professionals; it was one of the few places downtown where they could congregate among like folks. The restaurant thrived, driven by the bar scene, and eventually moved to larger digs a few blocks away. The menu revivified old Southern favorites like fried green tomatoes, crab cakes, macaroni and cheese, and mashed sweet potatoes, and it also gave a nod to Caribbean influences, with pigeon peas and rice and fried plantains. They were served alongside dishes like curried coconut oysters with a coconut wasabi dip and "Swamp Thang," a saute of shrimps, scallops, and crayfish napped with a Dijon mustard sauce and presented over a bed of greens. Smith grew from success to success. With her model bearing and polish, she was the perfect crossover culinary icon for the period. Eventually she moved out of the metaphoric "kitchen" and became a brand, following in the footsteps of Martha Stewart, perhaps the most successful of all the culinary entrepreneurs. Media-genic Smith has been so successful with her endeavors that she has penned cooking and lifestyle books, had her own radio show, and was the host of her own television series. Her B. Smith with Style Home Collection is sold at Bed Bath and Beyond stores around the country, she became the spokesperson for a range of products, and she now owns three eponymous restaurants.
B. Smith's had been open for several years when Cafe Beulah opened downtown in the early 1990s. Cafe Beulah, however, was a new kind of African American culinary endeavor: one that combined African American food with a setting full of black and white celebrities and bold-face names. Also located downtown, outside of Harlem, it offered a menu of foods described as "Southern revival" by Alexander Smalls, the force majeure force majeure behind the place. The bistrolike decor-tile floors, cream and white walls, and a burnished wood bar near the entrance of the small eighty-seat spot-offered no hint to its ethnicity. That was subtly done by the photographs decorating the walls showing blacks at play, including one of blacks in a car in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background! The menu was like no other: chicken liver pate wrapped in collard greens, macaroni and cheese terrine, and free-range fried behind the place. The bistrolike decor-tile floors, cream and white walls, and a burnished wood bar near the entrance of the small eighty-seat spot-offered no hint to its ethnicity. That was subtly done by the photographs decorating the walls showing blacks at play, including one of blacks in a car in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background! The menu was like no other: chicken liver pate wrapped in collard greens, macaroni and cheese terrine, and free-range fried poussin poussin with wild rice cake and Lowcountry succotash. Here was an African American place that dared to "signify," or slyly comment on, American attitudes toward soul food and expectations of black restaurants. While the menu was sassy, many of the dishes, like the seafood and crab gumbo and the hush puppies, offered Carolina Lowcoun-try food in almost classic presentation. with wild rice cake and Lowcountry succotash. Here was an African American place that dared to "signify," or slyly comment on, American attitudes toward soul food and expectations of black restaurants. While the menu was sassy, many of the dishes, like the seafood and crab gumbo and the hush puppies, offered Carolina Lowcoun-try food in almost classic presentation.
Part of the lure of Cafe Beulah was the people-watching. A former opera singer, Smalls treated Cafe Beulah as his own personal salon, and the place attracted a crowd of black notables, from opera singer Kathleen Battle to writer Toni Morrison, giving the spot a frothy feel appropriate to the fin de siecle. Cafe Beulah closed before the century did, in 1998, but Smalls went on to open two other restaurants: Sweet Ophelia's and the Shoebox Cafe, an eat-in/take-out place in Grand Central Station. However neither matched the excitement and verve of Cafe Beulah, and the restaurant-phobic aftermath of 9/11 regrettably put a temporary end to Smalls's restaurant empire.
Uptown, in Harlem, another former model, Norma Jean Darden, staked her claim. Two decades prior, in 1978, she had penned one of the first black cookbooks of the post-Civil Rights era, Spoon-bread and Strawberry Wine Spoon-bread and Strawberry Wine, with her sister, Carole. The book, an intriguing mixture of memoir, anecdotes, and recipes, tells the multigenerational tale of their family through the foods they loved to cook and eat. Illustrated with family photographs and telling a compelling family story in the Roots-dominated period, it quickly became an African American classic. Based on the book's success, Darden was also empire building by the 1980s. In 1983, she established Spoonbread Catering and became one of Harlem's best-known caterers, providing food on the set of The Cosby Show The Cosby Show and keeping uptown's partygoers well fed. Her catering success resulted in the establishment of the restaurant Miss Mamie's Spoon-bread Too in 1998. Located on the West Side of Manhattan, with easy access from Harlem and from downtown, Miss Mamie's was successful and in 2001 spawned a second restaurant, Miss Maude's Spoonbread Too. and keeping uptown's partygoers well fed. Her catering success resulted in the establishment of the restaurant Miss Mamie's Spoon-bread Too in 1998. Located on the West Side of Manhattan, with easy access from Harlem and from downtown, Miss Mamie's was successful and in 2001 spawned a second restaurant, Miss Maude's Spoonbread Too.
Darden's endeavors, like those of Smith and Smalls, played on both sides of the African American culinary divide. Her restaurant menus remained rooted in the traditional Southern fare-grits, candied yams, banana-bread pudding, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, smothered pork chops, North Carolina barbecue, and what was dubbed the best fried chicken in the city by the New York Post New York Post. Her catering menu offered African American classics but also foods more international in scope, including such items as foie gras mousse on chickpea chips with blackberry chutney, miniature biscuits with ham or turkey and honey mustard, miso-seared scallops, lamb tagine, and cornbread-stuffed chicken with rosemary gravy. However, the South rose again in desserts like miniature peach cobblers served with whipped cream and mint, sweet potato tartlettes, sweet potato souffle, and red velvet cake. The combination suited New Yorkers who still wanted their soul food spots, even if they did include other items on the menu.
The multiplicity of African American cooking styles and their intersection with those from other parts of the African Diaspora and from around the world that were served in the neo-soul restaurants became the hallmarks of African American food in the last decade of the twentieth century and the opening one of the twenty-first. Cookbooks celebrated them and continued to proliferate, as African American cooks and chefs re-created their favorite dishes in print for home cooks, food journalists and dietitians culled their best recipes, and food historians documented and traced some of the roots and variations of the food of the African Diaspora. Cookbooks also recorded the cooking of African American churches and detailed heritage recipes from historically black colleges and black fraternal organizations. The regional aspects of the foods of the African American South came under scrutiny, as did those of the African continent and throughout the diaspora. The University of Alabama library now boasts an African American cookbook collection that has thousands of volumes-a testimonial to the prolific output of the black culinary authors of the period.
A few black chefs and a small but growing number of black foodies attended not only mainstream food events but also created their own, like Joe Randall's A Taste of Heritage, where they cross-pollinated and shared recipes and inspirations; and Taste of Ebony, held for three successive years in the mid-2000s, which lavishly celebrated black chefs for an invited public that tasted wine from South Africa and black-owned California vineyards and sampled the offerings of black caterers and chefs from around the country and across the globe. Other events, like Harlem's Men Who Cook, gave the general public a feel for what was going on in the country's African American home kitchens. Growing numbers of African Americans began to attend culinary schools and try to make their way to the summit of the culinary world.
The future, though, was not always rosy. Despite increasing opportunities and a growing appreciation of African American foods, there were still proportionately few African Americans who had risen to the ranks of superstar chef. The question of why so few African American chefs was much debated. Many recognized that the role of chef offered little inducement to those who had been enslaved for centuries, then traditionally relegated to lower-l evel service roles receiving low pay and no glory. Those who could afford the often-expensive tuitions at culinary schools discovered upon graduation that despite their abilities, they were often ghet-toized, and the soul food debate still raged. "Part of the problem with African-American chefs is that people don't think of us as cooking anything other than ribs or barbecue," argued black chef Joe Randall, a forty-three-year veteran of the hospitality and food service industry. Even one who had attained the coveted status, Patrick Clark, while stating that he felt no prejudice directed toward him personally, recognized the difficulty for young black chefs. It seemed that despite a long history of culinary attainment, black chefs might again be thwarted from grabbing the brass ring of full culinary equality as signaled by financial success. But the final chapter remains unfinished.
In the post-millennium era, the food world has continued to grow and has become more complex. Food justice has become a major topic, addressing the systematic gastronomic disenfranchise-ment that is suffered by people in poor countries around the world as well as in the nation's poorer neighborhoods. The cry for fresh, seasonal, and local ingredients has brought people black and white to farmer's markets searching for fresh foods produced by individuals not agribusinesses. Urban gardening has gripped the imaginations of many, and blacks who are generations from Southern dirt now find themselves harvesting crops of tomatoes grown on a fire escape or taking snippets of rosemary from a window box. African Americans, like all in the country, continue to be culinary omnivores, eating not only the traditional foods of the African American South but also foods from the far-flung African Diaspora and the rest of the world as well.
New waves of immigrants have arrived from the African motherland, set up restaurants, and reacquainted us with tastes of our long-departed homeland. Morou Ouattara cooks recipes learned from his Ivoirian grandmother in the Washington, D.C., area and Pierre Thiam reinvents Senegalese classics in Brooklyn, New York. Bryant Terry creates vegan soul food in Oakland, California. Around the country, African American chefs are stepping up to stoves and creating foods that are expressions of the sum total of the black cultural experience: African, Southern, Caribbean, and more. And it seems that we are finally on our way to having our media superstars. The four currently most likely to succeed all represent different aspects of black diversity and are unlikely standard-bearers for the centuries-old traditions of African American cooking: a couple and a former hotel chef from Atlanta and an Ethiopian raised in Sweden.
Pat and Gina Neely are the more traditional of these chefs. They began their journey to fame in 1988, when the four Neely brothers opened a barbecue restaurant in downtown Memphis, a city known for its mastery of the genre. The Neelys' place prospered, and soon the family businesses numbered three. A segment with weatherman cum food critic Al Roker of the Today Show Today Show took news of the brothers' way with barbecue national. In 2008 Pat and Gina were given their own television show on the Food Network-the cable media juggernaut that created such culinary superstars as Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and Paula Deen. took news of the brothers' way with barbecue national. In 2008 Pat and Gina were given their own television show on the Food Network-the cable media juggernaut that created such culinary superstars as Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and Paula Deen.
Down Home with the Neelys cemented their national prominence, and thanks to the power of television, they have become arguably the best-known African American cooks in the country. However, their renown did not come without controversy. As one of the very few African American cooking shows with national distribution, cemented their national prominence, and thanks to the power of television, they have become arguably the best-known African American cooks in the country. However, their renown did not come without controversy. As one of the very few African American cooking shows with national distribution, Down Home with the Neelys Down Home with the Neelys came under close scrutiny, especially from blacks. The virulence of the critics amply demonstrated how complex the world of black food had become. The format of the show, the dishes prepared, and the patter Pat and Gina Neely engage in while cooking have all been analyzed on culinary Web sites. At the show's inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue. A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries, and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family's "loud and boisterous" manner. The level of sexual innuendo in the couple's banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African American lifestyle and cooking. Changes were made, and today came under close scrutiny, especially from blacks. The virulence of the critics amply demonstrated how complex the world of black food had become. The format of the show, the dishes prepared, and the patter Pat and Gina Neely engage in while cooking have all been analyzed on culinary Web sites. At the show's inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue. A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries, and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family's "loud and boisterous" manner. The level of sexual innuendo in the couple's banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African American lifestyle and cooking. Changes were made, and today Down Home with the Neelys Down Home with the Neelys remains one of the Food Network's most popular shows and indeed one of the few shows by black chefs that is available to a national television audience. remains one of the Food Network's most popular shows and indeed one of the few shows by black chefs that is available to a national television audience.