Month: February 2016

A few weeks ago, while the snow was still coming down, with nowhere to go, I forced myself to do something that I haven’t done since the internet ostensibly put all of history at our fingertips: I called a stranger.

The purpose of my call was to reach anyone involved in the cookbook “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County.”

After some disconnected numbers and voice messages to the void, I reached Bertha Hunt, the daughter of Theresa Swales “Nannie” Young of Leonardtown, a woman with many recipes throughout the book. Theresa Young passed away in November 2012 at the age of 91.

“It’s in my kitchen right now,” Bertha declared when I asked about the cookbook.

Theresa Young was “a living saint” according to her daughter, with cooking skills that were “a gift from God.” Hunt emphasized her mother’s ability to cook completely from scratch with no assistance from conveniences like Jiffy cornbread mix – the likes of which “couldn’t touch” her mother’s cornbread. She recalled how they once grew sweet potatoes, kale, green beans, and “tomaters”, and how they always had “some form of dessert” with dinners – cake, raisin bread, her scratch-made peach cobbler. Her mother, she said, didn’t raise any “skinny twiggy daughters.”

Hunt continues to reside in Leonardtown. She has inherited her mother’s love (and skill) of cooking and spoke with pride about that fact.

Theresa Young illustration by Ben Claassen III

Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham is still very popular in St. Mary’s County, and many of the longtime Black citizens there have not forgotten that this delicacy was born from the inventiveness and hardship of their ancestors. Four of the hundred-some-odd pages of “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” are dedicated to stuffed ham, and Bertha Hunt mentioned it specifically, although her mother’s treasured recipe does not appear in the book. Hunt extolled the importance of fresh Amish market greens and McCormick spices in stuffed ham, which she still makes for special occasions with corned hams from B. K. Miller Meats in Clinton.

The heritage of stuffed ham is also discussed in an oral history interview located in the “SlackWater Archive” at St. Mary’s College of Maryland Archives. There, Theresa Young recorded that her grandmother was enslaved at the Blackistone Plantation at the current location of the St. Mary’s Academy. Theresa’s grandmother was a child growing up on a plantation while her mother tended the cows and worked the fields. They slept in a shack with a dirt floor and used oyster shells for eating utensils. Bertha Hunt mentioned to me that her great-grandmother had slept on beds made of potato sacks stuffed with autumn leaves. These stories have been passed down through generations, but the SlackWater oral histories are a fortunate document for posterity.

Many of the intertwined families of contributors to “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” come up in those documents. My entry for Edith Dyson’s crab cakes explores another family connected with the cookbook.

“A chitterling dinner consists of chitterlings, potato salad, greens, bread, pie and beer or iced tea.” – Theresa Young in 300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County

Food and race can be a fraught topic – one which I lack the experience or the authority to fully delve into in this website. The most visible facet is the stereotypes that have been used to deride African Americans’ (and other groups’) relationship with food from the outset of the United States. While trying to stay mindful of that context, my aim is to relay the joy and determination preserved within the spiral-bound covers of “300 Years of Black Cooking.” In the face of cruel stereotypes and food access injustice, cookbooks like this one not only preserved a neglected aspect of American heritage, but also sometimes served to fund – and feed – social causes.

“These culinary community advocates ‘bore little resemblance to the smiling, subservient, plump fictional mammies projected in advertising and on film, not only liberating Black women from the backs of buses but also from white kitchens’ as Patricia Turner Observed in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies. And they took their recipes with them.

Black culinary workers championed their neighbors’ economic, social and political priorities during the civil rights movement the same way that the Colored Female’s Free Produce Society organized women in the 1830s to boycott products produced by slave labor and to ‘overthrow the economic power of slavery’” – Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks

“300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” was put together in 1975 by “Citizens for Progress,” a group working to address poverty by tackling issues such as welfare rights, housing, and financial services. The book was intended to help fund a new community center. Community cookbooks were of course very popular at the time but this one is special.

Rather than representing members of a particular organization, church parish, school, or social club, the recipes in “300 Years” were gathered from an assortment of families in the region.

The introduction includes a brief explanation of the African origins of Southern Maryland food. Although “soul food” had been receiving some cultural recognition around the time of the book’s publication, Maryland then as now was caught in a nether region of questioned Southern identity. When people’s foodways become a commodity to rank, authenticate, and exploit, real people’s experiences fall by the wayside. “300 Years” is one of the only books documenting the history of Black cooking in Maryland (outside of the recipes adopted by and subsequently credited to white cooks.)

I’m glad I picked up the phone and spoke to a person, rather than relying on what sparse documentation of this book is available on the internet. Bertha Hunt, daughter of just one of the many people who contributed to this book, so kindly and spiritedly demonstrated the importance of these unique Maryland food traditions.

There is a modern misconception about “folkways”: that the groups who created and perpetuated these cultures of food, music, and craftsmanship didn’t recognize their value. It may seem that if it weren’t for prescient cultural saviors -Alan Lomax types (nothing against Lomax!)- that people would carelessly let their treasures slip away into obscurity with the changing times. This is, of course, projection. It is society at large which did not place a value on the many cultural treasures of the poor, the marginalized, the ‘folks.’ Issues with literacy, material hardship and resources may have made deliberate preservation a daunting undertaking, but there has never been a shortage of people – especially women- who recognized the significance of their contributions, even in the face of a society that didn’t.