Southern Hospitality

NATHAN: Make no mistake, food in America is complicated business. It’s not just about eating, it’s also about cultural identity and cultural appropriation, and has been since the country’s founding.

BRIAN: So today on the show, we offer up some iconic American foods. From Johnny cakes to cake mixes, we’ll hear about the sacred union of wild rice to the Ojibwe people in northern Minnesota. And I’ll bite into an ethnic food it’s been totally Americanized, the burrito.

NATHAN: But first, we’re taking you to an 18th century feast.

JOANNE: Historian Kelley Fanto Deetz writes about food ways on Virginia plantations. She says that feasting was the major form of entertainment for wealthy planters.

KELLEY: You would find multiple tablecloths laid out. You would have several courses of food. You would have puddings, you’d have roasted meats, you’d have fruit from all over the place. You’d have– I mean, the spread was all about showing off your wealth. There was more food than anyone could have ever eaten at these things.

JOANNE: Guests would sit down to eat in the mid afternoon, after the men spent several hours drinking in the parlor. Deetz says, alcohol was every bit as important as the food.

KELLEY: Oh, my goodness. They had rum from the Caribbean, they had tons of brandies, they had wines that were made on grounds made out of blackberry. And so you’d get pretty drunk before dinner.

NATHAN: Now, of course, all of this bounty, from the imported rum to the meats and the puddings served to dinner was produced, cooked, and served by enslaved people. Our co-host, Ed Ayers sat down with Kelley Fanto Deetz to talk about these plantation feasts and the enslaved people who prepared them. They start us off in the dining room, with the guests.

KELLEY: The whole idea is you go and you feast. And feasting was central to Southern hospitality. If you think about the pineapple that you see all over Virginia, right? Most people don’t even realize what that means. If you were wealthy enough to have a pineapple, that meant that you had ships probably going to the Caribbean to pick up your rum, to pick up some exotic fruit, to bring it back. And then if you were hospitable enough, you would offer that pineapple to your guests.

ED: It does seem strange that you see these wooden pineapples all across the South. They seem to be big in South Carolina, as well.

KELLEY: Yes, absolutely.

ED: But all it means is we’re so freaking rich, we have pineapples.

KELLEY: Yeah. And we’re going to let you eat them.

ED: OK.

KELLEY: Exactly, exactly. That’s the whole thing, right? It’s one thing to feast by yourself. It’s another to show off your wealth and your willingness to feast with your guests. And you think about this, all about overexerting yourself on eating as much as you possibly can. That is exactly what they were doing on these plantations.

ED: So let’s talk about that kitchen. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, producing this cornucopia of endless food. Can you describe this kitchen for us?

KELLEY: Absolutely. So the kitchens that I look at in my work are the ones that are on the larger plantations.

ED: Right.

KELLEY: So the larger plantations are also the ones that are going to be doing this kind of entertaining, the balls and all of that. Cooking in one of these plantations was an incredibly challenging task. And if you think about it in terms of menus that were offered, one of the dishes that Virginians ate constantly and anyone by the water ate constantly was versions of oysters. So oyster stew, fried oysters, just raw oysters, barbecued oysters.

Any way you could eat an oyster, Virginians were doing this. And you can see this in the records. So imagine one of the dishes that you’re having at supper is oyster stew. This is one dish of maybe 10 that are on the table, of one of the three courses or four, if you’re really getting fancy. Now, if anyone has ever shucked an oyster, they know how hard it is to get those little things open. So if a recipe calls for 100 oysters, that’s only one bit of labor for one dish that probably took the cook an hour or more to get through.

ED: Right.

KELLEY: And so it was a constant job to labor in those Kitchens. And it was also 24 hours a day.

ED: Yeah, your work helped me realize just how hard all this cooking was, because it’s also fire building, pot lifting, animal skinning, all these different kinds of things. It sounded remarkably labor intensive. And also, maybe even dangerous?

KELLEY: Absolutely. And if you think about the ways in which you have to cook on an open hearth and the fact that they were cooking the majority of every day, and I guarantee they were exhausted most the time that they were cooking.

ED: And wearing a long dress too, right?

KELLEY: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Literally in the fire. You know, enslaved cooks died from burns more than anything. And one of the things that enslaved cooks had to do was stick their arm in the oven to see how hot it was. And if it was hot enough to bake any baked goods, you would have to pull it out immediately. It only takes one or two seconds of leaving it in there too long to scald yourself in that situation. As well as the dull knives they had to use. I mean, cutting yourself with a dull knife is not something that anyone looks forward to. And I guarantee that the crude utensils that they had during this period did no favors to people’s body parts.

ED: So we have an embarrassment of too much food, really, when the company comes to the big house. What would daily life have been like for the enslaved people? I’m guessing that they didn’t have to worry about having too many leftovers.

KELLEY: Actually, a lot of the enslaved people were underfed, you know, routinely for generations. This is something that plagued most enslaved populations. They did not have enough food, and this was an intentional way to keep them busy. You know, not running away. You would be eating, basically, you would get your ration from the overseer. It would be, if you’re up in Virginia, it would be a little bit of cornmeal and a piece of fatback. And then you basically had to hunt and create your meals with supplemental food. So enslaved folks had to grow their own gardens.

ED: Right.

KELLEY: And this is on top of working for their enslavers for 12 hours a day. They would come back to the quarter. They would have to tend to their own gardens. They would have to go hunt possums or raccoons or squirrels or anything they could get their hands on. And this is also something that you see in the tradition of gumbo, is having one spot in the quarter.

So if each person only had a little bit of something, by themselves that’s not a lot. But when you have communal eating, when you’re able to combine all of the fatback and all of the cornmeal and then you get somebody’s possum and you get somebody’s squirrel and you have some oysters to throw into that pot, it becomes something that is essential for not only eating and being full, but having a sense of community in these quarters as well.

ED: So are there dangers as we imagine this bounty upstairs and this sort of creativity downstairs as we think about culinary history? Are there risks in doing this?

KELLEY: Absolutely. I think it’s really important to understand that the romance of food is tightly tethered to the pain of slavery. That every single thing that these people were eating came from the exploitation of enslaved African and African descended people. And so you cannot have a plantation feast without having thousands of enslaved Africans making sure that you ate whatever you wanted to if you were a free person.

ED: So do we know the names and identities of some of these cooks who were making these wonderful feasts?

KELLEY: George Washington’s enslaved chef, I think, is really remarkable. And I’ll tell you why. He was enslaved by George Washington at the age of 16 years old at Mount Vernon. He married a seamstress. He had children there. When Washington moved to Philadelphia to run this new nation, he brought with him Chef Hercules.

Now, Hercules made a splash in Philadelphia. He met a lot of people. He was very well-respected. There’s rumors that he– or there’s records of him dressing up in this extravagant outfit. He had buckled shoes, he had a hat, he had a gold cane. And he would walk down Main Street in Philadelphia and people would bow to him. His kitchen was so well-known that people bought leftovers out of the back door. It was up to $200 a year to eat his food, right? I would argue that–

ED: Back when $200 would buy you a lot of food.

KELLEY: That’s a lot of money, right? So I would argue that Chef Hercules is America’s first celebrity chef, hands down. I can’t think of anybody during that period that was more well-known than him.

ED: So you seem to know a lot about this cooking stuff. How did you get interested in this?

KELLEY: So it was a combination of things. I was a professional cook for 10 years in California before I decided to be a historian or go dig in the dirt and be an archaeologist. And so I got into it through actually reading the 18th century Virginia Gazette when I was in graduate school, trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to write my dissertation on. When I came across all of the ads for enslaved cooks, I had a million questions. And then it was nice too because I used my culinary training in the archives by looking at old cookbooks.

And something that I really enjoyed doing was you’d get your white gloves on and you’re in the Virginia Historical Society and everything’s all precious. And you get this cookbook that still smells like smoke. Right? It has a very different funk than the diaries and things have, because it was in the kitchen. And just like you would do if you got your grandma’s church cookbook, you let the thing open the way it opens. And the dirtiest pages and the pages that it naturally opened to were the ones that were used over and over and over again. So I used very pragmatic, very common sense ideas to think about the ways in which food was prepared and also chosen out of these cookbooks.

ED: Does it strike you that in some ways, we’re recovering some of the best parts of this food culture?

KELLEY: I think that we are, but it’s at the same time that we’re still continually ignoring the history of enslaved people. And so, again, trying to marry those two things is really important. I found that my work, looking at enslaved cooks in these kitchens, is kind of a gateway drug for people to talk about slavery. Because most folks won’t come to a lecture on slavery, but they’ll come to a lecture about food, because everybody loves food. Because there’s a Food Network, because people are obsessed with it.

When people come and listen to me speak, they very quickly realize that I’m talking about labor, that I’m talking about chattel slavery, I’m talking about abuse, the subversive roles of these enslaved cooks. And then, of course, the art that they produced. But it’s all one in the same and you cannot tease those out. And if you go to plantation museums today– and this has been the case for generations– you hear about the mistress cooking the foods, you hear about this very sanitized version of history, when in fact, if you look closer or just open your eyes a little bit, you realize very quickly that it’s nuance than that, and it’s lot more complicated.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: Kelley Fanto Deetz is the author of Bound to the Fire– How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine.

JOANNE: Earlier, we heard from Katharina Vestar, a historian at American University.

[MUSIC PLAYING]