High on the Hog: A Journey Through African-American Culinary History

By Mary Saunders Bulan

Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was published in 2011. Part memoir, history lesson, and cookbook, it reads like a picaresque biography of multiple subjects, making lemonade out of a hard life in the early, middle, and present-day U.S.

Harris has published multiple African-American cuisine-focused cookbooks and worked for years as a travel editor for Essence magazine. In this book, she writes with an engaging, narrative style as she travels to Africa and throughout the U.S. on an exploration of culinary and cultural connections. Harris draws expertly from original texts to tell stories of Black cooks and chefs, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and controversial luminaries, from pre-Columbian Africa to the America of Down Home with the Neelys on the Food Network.

LAST SUMMER I ATTENDED a Chow Chow festival event (a culinary event that celebrates the food culture of the Southern Appalachian Mountains) about Malinda Russell, the author of the rst known cookbook by a Black American author. I was working the event as a volunteer for the Organic Grower’s School (Asheville, NC), behind a table selling T-shirts and water bottles, and handing out yers. The attendees were foodies, locals, and visitors to Asheville, NC, who had paid $150 a ticket to eat nine courses prepared by a few of the hottest celebrity chefs in town, and to hear a panel of historians and cookbook authors discuss Russell’s cooking, her life, and the importance of her recently rediscovered 1866 text, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen.

The African roots of food we eat in the United States is a subject I became aware of gradually. In my hometown in Lowcountry South Carolina, we were served rice and gravy with fried chicken and green beans every Thursday in the high school cafeteria. My Asian immigrant mother fed us greens, sh, and rice almost daily, but when I left home I came to understand the turnip or mustard greens or collards and rice we ate in local “meat and three” restaurants drew from African, not Asian traditions. Only later did I see that what I understood as a uniquely Southern food, turnip tops without the roots, was originally the unwanted half of the crop that enslaved Africans were allowed to eat, and a substitute for leafy greens their ancestors had prepared and eaten back home.

As a bona de foodie myself, a farmer, and a Southerner, I pricked up my ears when I heard from friends that Net ix had a documentary on African-American cuisine called High on the Hog. I watched one or two episodes of this surprisingly moving series. But besides kids shows and March Madness, I’m not much for TV, and so I recently found myself picking up the source text by Jessica B. Harris instead. High on the

Harris brings to life historical gures like Hercules, the much-esteemed head chef of President George Washington who eventually escaped from Mount Vernon; and James Hemings, Thomas Je erson’s Black chef who trained in Paris and ran the famed kitchens of Monticello. After his stay in revolutionary France, Hemings petitioned Je erson for his freedom, and was granted it on the condition that he remain in servitude until he had trained a satisfactory replacement.

Harris answers questions you may have never thought to ask about plantation rations and various historical approaches to feeding enslaved people. She memorably and devastatingly quotes from WPA-era oral histories and contemporary journal entries. Harris details complex alternative food economies that developed in enslaved communities: men and women who gardened, shed and hunted after hours, and then sold or bartered the surplus. In cities like Charleston, SC, some enslaved laborers wore metal badges registered to their owners as they sold produce or worked skilled trades for hire.

Harris is a natural storyteller. She evokes the soundscapes of early U.S. cities with Black food vendors hawking “ ne Rocka-a-way clams” in NYC, and Charleston peddlers, whose loud cries gave the streets a distinctly African feel and inspired irate letters to the newspaper editor. She touches on the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, a convention-defying woman who went West, and parlayed her culinary skills and business acumen into a real estate fortune in post-Gold Rush San Francisco. She introduces us to Harlem’s “Pig Foot Mary,” whose legal name was Lillian Haris Dean. She quotes The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, who as a young writer had conducted WPA interviews in the 1920s and 30s. One of Ellison’s ctional characters from the novel lives in Harlem and is brie y transported to his Southern past with the smell of a street vendor’s baked yams.

Harris wraps up her narrative with a brief foray into the modern politics of African-American food. She takes us through the civil rights actions at a lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, and describes the strict no-pork policy of the Nation of Islam. She points to Alex Haley’s 1977 autobiography Roots, and the subsequent television series, giving license to Americans of African descent to explore the bounty and traditions of their heritage. Travel to West Africa by the diaspora boomed at this time, and in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, Black tourists discovered familiar tastes and

FarmRaise Tracks

The New App for Farmers to Streamline Expense Tracking

KEEPING FARM RECEIPTS organized is not as much fun as digging a hole in the ground, but it’s still necessary. As a farmer myself, deep into tax season I find myself wishing for a better system to track business expenses. Enter FarmRaise Tracks. This new app is designed to help farmers with record keeping, and allows for categorizing expenses the same way they are reported on Schedule

F. (Schedule F — Form 1040 — is used to report farm income and expenses.)

The app allows one to quickly capture and summarize expenses by category and date so you can monitor your expenses for taxes or other business use. All your information can be downloaded to a .csv file (spreadsheet format).

At our family farm, Little Farm Black Mountain, we’re making early season purchases of seeds, soil amendments, and culinary connections in a homeland their ancestors were forced to leave. I got the sense that Harris’s own journey began around this era. tools, so I tried to log some of these expenses into FarmRaise Tracks. It’s a pretty intuitive user interface, where you can (+) Add Expenses, and enter the vendor, price, and category. You can also assign the expense to a specific enterprise, such as buying biodegradable cow-manure based pots and charging it to the “Seedling Sales” piece of your business. One receipt can also be split among categories, such as if you’re buying both seeds and tools from a vendor like Johnny’s.

Harris’s candid, personal style of writing and focus on extraordinary people makes the often harsh and bitter hardships in her subject matter easier to digest. Whether you watched High on the Hog or not, there is plenty to sink your teeth into here. The book concludes with an index of names and subjects, a formidable bibliography for further reading, and naturally, a few dozen recipes.

Yassa au Poulet: marinated lemon and chili chicken, grilled and poached in sauce, was mouth-watering. I’ll leave it to other readers to kitchen test “Possum and Sweet Potatoes”.

You can take photos of receipts to attach it to the expense, which works easily. There is also the option to upload a file with a receipt in it, say if you save an email receipt to PDF and want to upload the file. This function did not work for me, however. The app is still in Beta testing. Another downside is that if you decide you need a different photo of the receipt, you can’t edit it once you have saved the expense.

FarmRaise Tracks can be accessed on a mobile device through the App Store: FarmRaise Tracks on the App Store (apple.com) for a fee of $40 per month.

Who Will Be The Messenger Of This Land

Jaki Shelton Green, Poet Laureate of North Carolina

who will be the messenger of this land count its veins speak through the veins translate the language of water navigate the heels of lineage who will carry this land in parcels paper, linen, burlap who will weep when it bleeds and hardens forgets to birth itself who will be the messenger of this land wrapping its stories carefully in patois of creole, irish, gullah, twe, tuscarora stripping its trees for tea and pleasure who will help this land to remember its birthdays, baptisms weddings, funerals, its rituals denials, disappointments and sacri ces who will be the messengers of this land harvesting its truths bearing unleavened bread burying mutilated crops beneath its breasts who will remember to unbury the unborn seeds that arrived in captivity shackled, folded, bent, layered in its bowels we are their messengers with singing hoes and dancing plows with ngers that snap beans, arms that raise corn, feet that cover the dew falling from okra, beans, tomatoes we are these messengers whose ears alone choose which spices whose eyes alone name basil, nutmeg, fennel, ginger, cardamom, sassafras whose tongues alone carry hemlock, blood root, valerian, damiana, st. john’s wort these roots that contain its pleasures its languages its secrets we are the messengers new messengers arriving as mutations of ourselves we are these messengers blue breath red hands singing a tree into dance

Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina, is the rst African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, and the 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Jaki Shelton Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was appointed the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill.

Since our beginning, RAFI-USA has worked one-on-one with farmers of color to overcome systemic institutional, economic, and societal barriers and to help create sustainable prosperity on the land. In 2017 RAFI-USA launched the Farmers of Color Network (FOCN) to more intentionally support Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) farmers in the Southeast U.S. (and now in the U.S. Caribbean) so that they are improving their economic viability, keeping their land, and gaining generational investment.