ISSUE 77, BEGINNINGS, Part 1. The Beginnings of Southern Food 1
The Beginnings of Southern Food
Eight years ago a magazine writer asked me when southern food began. I had just published Southern Provisions which spent a quarter of chapter fretting over precisely this question. A fraught query—complicated by questions about when a southern sectional self-consciousness arose—when South eclipsed individual state identifications—when food became a mode of regional expression. I could recite landmarks: the southern restaurant at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876—the only American regional restaurant at that fair; the use of the phrase “at the South” about distinctive practices of agricultural in magazines of the late 1820s and 1830s. The British Imperial southern customs district that White Hall instituted in the 1730s. But on some fundamental level I thought the question nonsensical. Because sometimes something new emerges in cultures that haven’t wholly organized their self-understanding. In retrospect it seems an anticipation of what would blossom later.
Some things are clear. Something that we call southern food cannot be indistinguishable from a preparation long found in those cultures that settled the region. It can’t be a West African groundnut stew, an English oyster pie, a skillet of French duck braised with turnips, or even Native American hominy. Southern food emerged only when the old practice was violated somehow, or was combined with something from another of the constituent ethnic traditions of the region. When reading early reports of regional foodways, I look for novelties. As early as the first quarter of the 18th century they are there.
Naturalist Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and The Bahama Islands, reported of the early evolution of southern foodways and agriculture. Based on his first hand experiences in Virginia (1712-1719), the West Indies (1714), and South Carolina and parts South (1722-1726), Catesby captured a cultural moment when syncretisms took place in culture—when Native American treatments of Maize, for instance, encountered West African tastes and culinary practice, and Euro-American productions.
When it came to corn, Catesby described three categories of dishes—baked pones, whole corn hominy cooked with beans (although he missed the processing step of lye treating the dried kernels), and mush—what we in the South nowadays call grits.
What is surprising is that Catesby associates grits/mush with African Americans, rather than Native Americans. By 1725, cornmeal had already become part of slaves food ration. But the treatment is what attracts. Three modes of prepping for consumption are laid out—with fat (melted lard—butter was rare in SC), with a sweetener (think about the debates between no sugar and sugared corn bread approaches)—and grits cooked in cider. This last is the most surprising. He doesn’t supply a recipe. So we are left with a question about this early African-American adaptation of Native foods and foodways: was the ground meal cooked with cider as the liquid, or was the mush cooked in water per usual, and cider stirred into the finished girts? Whichever the case, a descendent with chunks of cooked apple survives in Appalachian cookery.
You have the European apple mulched and pressed into cider. Was it sweet unfermented cider or fermented. My bet is early stage fermented. You have the Native American hominy—lye-processed corn meal. And you have the African America one poet aesthetics presiding at the cook fire. This amalgamation of cultures was new and identifiable as a new path in cookery.
The 18th century is chock full of these dishes and moments: the sweet potato pone recorded in Rev. Griffith Hughes’s Natural History of Barbados (1750). Indigenous South American tuber treated by African cooks in a West African Manner consumed by Anglo colonists of the island. There’s the Ground Nut Cake sold on the street corners of Charleston as early as 1760s, with their South Asian Sugar Cane, South American Peanuts by way of West Africa, and lemons from Southern Europe crafted and sold by older black women hucksters on street corners. Agricultural experiment and oceanic trade made the new press against established cultural foodways. So the European collard nudged out the callilo from the Gullah greens pot. The Dried peach leather began to supplant the dried persimmon leather in the travel wallets of the Cherokee and Tuscarora. Many of these transitions and combinations occurred undocumented. But after the rise of the agricultural press in the United States in 1819, a significant