You can only preserve the elements of cultural heritage that you share. One way of hiding cultural heritage and natural history in plain sight is through foodways and recipes. Long before their arrival in the Americas by way of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Black people have transmitted histories and other pertinent information orally. This tradition was passed on by generations of enslaved Blacks and, ultimately, morphed into something more than even the ancestors imagined. The emergence of the internet and cell phones has made most information readily available to anyone with a handheld device; however, the oral tradition of sharing in close quarters remains closely guarded. Not every family member gets grandmom’s recipes. It’s only the individuals who have proven they have a passion for cooking, and they can flat out burn (slang for cook).
The kitchen, cookhouse, mess, or galley are more than just areas in which we create delectable meals, they’re places of sharing. Stories pour out of the kitchen, especially around the holidays, and into the minds of generations of family within the space. However, these innate stories mask the real histories that are hidden in plain sight. With every whisk, churn, flip, and fry in the kitchen, is an oral history of untold family knowledge. These stories, hidden in the unwritten recipes passed down orally within families, provide understanding of the very people we call family.
An oral history project I began in May seeks to capture the stories of African American families, as well as the unwritten recipes circulating in their families. Titled ‘Black folk and our food: Extracting traumatic memory hidden in unwritten family recipes through oral histories’, the project is a deliberate mission to preserve recipes, cooking methods and histories. Utilizing oral history collection as my primary methodology, the challenge is extracting the stories trapped between a pinch of salt and a handful of flour. The goal of this project is to use orally transmitted recipes as the vehicle to narrate often taboo family stories to better understand the functionality and adaptability of African American families. The project will also develop a narrative of the contemporary southern African American family.
Dr. James Avery, a Portsmouth, Virginia resident, had a very special relationship with his grandmother, Ollie Pearl Hassell. Faith, family, and food were at the heart of their relationship. As a child in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dr. Avery was his grandmother’s sous chef, studying her ways of preparing foods: deviled eggs, baked chicken wings and her cabbage. It was the cabbage he prepared during his oral history interview for the project. Seasoned meat, diced onions, salt, pepper, ground mustard, black pepper, garlic powder, Adobo seasoning (an addition made by his aunt), and pepper flakes (his own addition to the recipe) all ended up in a pot atop his stove, and all were added without a single measurement. While this may be considered an unorthodox way of cooking by trained culinary experts, in the African American culture, it is the direct connection to their ancestors and heritage. For Dr. Avery, sharing these moments in that space with his grandmother were a training ground and listening session.
One of ten grandchildren to Ollie Pearl, Dr. Avery learned about the lives of people in the church, the neighborhood, and sometimes about his grandmother’s sister, who she’d considered mean, all the while, she was passing down family recipes to the chosen grandchild. She never discussed what it was like growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and there was a lot to unpack regarding her city. Greensboro, the epicenter of the sit-ins in the United States, has always grappled with its dark, racist past that existed long before Ollie Pearl’s birth on June 12, 1924. In Greensboro, the color line is simple: whites to the west of Elm Street and Blacks east of the street. On February 1, 1960, on Elm Street, an F.W. Woolworth lunch counter became the center of attention as four freshmen male students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, marched from campus to the store and staged the first sit-in to desegregate the lunch counter. They were successful in desegregating Greensboro in July of that year, and their actions spawned a wave of similar acts around the country. By the time the sit-ins had begun in Greensboro, Ollie Pearl had already left the city and was residing in Virginia.
Ollie Pearl never spoke of who taught her to cook, but she basked in her culinary talents, preparing food to take to church and having a meal prepared for anyone who stopped by the house. As she aged and her health began to deteriorate, and Dr. Avery matured, Ollie Pearl would instruct him from the living room in preparing either breakfast or lunch. She could tell if he was using a pot that was too small, if water was boiling too fast or the pan was too hot, all by sound. From the living room, she would tell him to turn the burner down, and he’d follow every instruction. The reward was more than the appreciation of knowing he had prepared a meal for his grandmother; it was the time spent and the lessons learned. Those deeply personal meetings came to an end in February 2008 when Ollie Pearl died. She was 83.
The memory of Ollie Pearl lives on in the recipes she left behind that yielded awe-inspiring stories. In particular, the cabbage recipe tells a love story. Before he passed, Clyde William Hassell, Ollie Pearl’s husband, grew vegetables in their backyard. Green cabbage was one of the more easily-cultivated crops and there was plenty of it. Even after his death, Ollie Hassell still prepared cabbage, though she had to buy it from the grocery store. But although his grandmother continued to prepare the dish, Dr. Avery still wasn’t a fan. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her cooking, he revered it; he just wasn’t big on cabbage. That feeling, too, would change.
The aromas of cabbage cooking conjure memories of Ollie Pearl. The windows in his home don’t sweat like they did in his grandmother’s kitchen, but the smells of her recipes being prepared in his spacious kitchen, with air vents, prompt memories of conversations with her. The smell of boiling neckbones brings forth stories of Ollie Pearl talking about her uncle who made moonshine in the woods of North Carolina and her message of don’t let people see what goes into your food for seasoning. The kitchen was not just a sacred place where meals were prepared, it is a repository for the stories, lessons, and memories of Ollie Pearl.
Dr. Avery was not forced to be in the kitchen with Ollie Pearl, he pushed his way into that space. He wanted to be in there to learn and spend time with his grandmother and by default, has become the “neo-griot,” for his family, equipped with the stories that exist in the unwritten recipes that she passed onto him. By participating in this project, Dr. Avery not only preserved this recipe for future generations of his family, but he also offered further, critical insight into the functionality and hierarchy that exists in African American families, whereas individuals in the family have specific roles. Though she shared many stories with him, there were stories he says he wished she would have told about her relationship with her parents and other relatives.
At its best, comfort food can deliver us from the ills of the world and brings forth a euphoric state in which we can escape and live in a blissful, stress-free world. This concept of comfort food is critical to this project in that the very vessels for the stories I am searching for rests in the recipes and dishes of the participants. Several other narrators have, like Dr Avery, shared elements of their lives and those of their ancestors through recipes. These recipes are far from average fare. They are glimpses into a time when Black people were subjected to segregation, marginalization and, in some cases, enslavement. We cannot simply look at recipes as resources that fulfill our hunger, we must look at them for what they are: cultural heritage, natural history, and oral histories. Without her recipes, we cannot fully contextualize Ollie Pearl. Within her recipes lies the pragmatic origins of a family, a story of triumph, love, and faith. At the core, these are the makings of African American families and offer an extraordinary window into our past and present. The “Black Folk and our Food,” project will continuously bring forth the stories of people like Ollie Pearl as examples of the courage and strength of Blacks in America represented through our food.
Further Reading
Smith, Graham, “The Making of Oral History: Sections 1-2”, University of London
Twitty, Michael. “The Cooking Gene: A journey through African American culinary history in the old south,” 2017 (Harper/Collins Publishers)
Andre L. Taylor is the oral historian and Ph.D. student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virgnia.
Historians for History 