By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — As Americans continue the tradition of celebrating bountiful harvest and family on the Thanksgiving Holiday, many share foods popularized by African Americans without even realizing it. One such food, now identified as a soul food staple, is the ever-better-served with bacon dish, collard greens. The oldest leafy green in the cabbage family, collard greens originated near Greece and came to America in the early 1600s when the first Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. According to the LATIBAH Collard Green Museum in Charlotte, N.C,
“collard greens were just one of a few select vegetables that African-Americans were allowed to grow and harvest for themselves and their families throughout times of enslavement, and so over the years cooked greens developed into a traditional food…Even after the Africans were emancipated in the late 1800s, their love of greens continued and they kept handing down their well-developed repertoire of greens recipes from one generation to the next.”
Another Thanksgiving food with African American Origins is cornbread, of which Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie, a professor of history and foods at Babson College in Massachusetts, said, “A lot of those things that were a part of our cuisine come out of survival techniques…During the week, enslaved people ate things like hoecakes, cornbread, or ashcakes.”
He further described the method as mixing cornmeal with water and then cooking the actual cake of ashes. Using this technique, cornbread became a fundamental part of the diet of enslaved Americans, as they were often given limited rations and limited time to eat.
The meal became especially useful for enslaved Americans who were sent to work in the fields, as it could be easily transported, could last a long time, and could be eaten using only hands. Most slaves were given little or no breaks for meals, and cornbread was an easy fix for children. Influenced by Native American practices while being prepared by enslaved Americans, cornbread recipes eventually appeared in plantation cookbooks. The family of James Monroe for example, recorded recipes for egg bread and spoon bread that used similar techniques as enslaved and Native American ashcakes but added richer ingredients like milk and butter.
Sweet Potatoes are also a long favorite ingredient used for meals, sides, and desserts of Thanksgiving. They are far sweeter vegetables and were well known for their ability to grow in less ideal soil and an ideal crop for enslaved peoples and poor whites. Techniques, influenced by both Native and African American communities, on how to grow sweet potatoes were passed down from generation to generation.
The food originated in America and was a familiar staple in the diets of many Native American nations. Being incredibly like the yams they had worked with previously; African Americans were able to apply their traditional methods to the food with relative ease. Many even chose to roast the potatoes in hot ashes while wrapped in leaves such as how they would prepare cornbread or cook them over an open fire with other foods.
Arguably one of the most prominent foods associated with the influence African culture had on the New World, the Ethopia native dish of okra is another popular Thanksgiving dish. Following the forced relocation of enslaved people, okra was introduced to North America from the Caribbean by the 1700s. In West Africa okra was often used as a thickening agent for soups, far later also appearing in the popular 1824 cookbook The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph, who included the vegetable in two stews, including a now familiar dish called gumbo.
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