Before there were ethical questions about organic vegetables, GMOs or factory farming, American consumers were faced with the ultimate ethical consumption conflict: slavery.
As we have seen with the issue of baking powder, regional and cultural adoption of foods was sometimes influenced by commitment to the abolitionist movement. While this can mean an aversion to the labor involved in making the food, as with beaten biscuits, it can also mean the labor involved in growing the ingredients, as with sugar or rice.
While sugar has a famously violent slave-trade past, people are maybe somewhat less aware of the connection between beloved Southern rice dishes and slave labor.
Rice made its way to this continent along with the enslaved West African people whose ancestors had domesticated and cultivated it thousands of years earlier.
1871 Baltimore Sun
In 1648, a pamphlet on Virginia (published for the interest of the English in London) reported that governor “Sir William” [Berkeley] procured rice and ordered it to be sown in Virginia, where “it prospered gallantly.”
More rice was planned to be sown the following year, “for we perceive the ground and climate is very proper for it as our negroes affirm, which in their country is most of their food, and very healthful for our bodies.”
As historian Michael Twitty points out, these enslaved Africans and their African-American descendants continued to grow rice regionally; “in slave narratives well outside of the rice country, enslaved people talk about their families growing rice as a subsistence or truck crop… [which] was being sold at market where it competed locally against rice imported from Carolina.”
While growing rice as additional subsistence for family or for better financial autonomy is one thing, growing rice for commercial trade is another altogether. David Shields’ “Southern Provisions” quotes an 1853 account of Carolina slaves engaged in the process of farming rice. Working in “gangs” of around 20 people, the enslaved not only sowed and harvested the rice, but performed extensive irrigation and land preparation. Failure to meet work quotas or comply was enforced with whippings and solitary confinement.
The Chesapeake region may not have had rice culture to this extent, but rice was certainly grown in the 1600′s through 1800′s. The 1860 agricultural census has a column for pounds of rice produced by farming households. According to Barbara Wells Sarudy in “Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake”, sixteenth-century planter John Beale Boardley touted the rice harvested in the loamy Annapolis-area soil as being “preferred to the best imported rice.”
Rice dishes certainly proliferated in Maryland cookbooks in the mid-to-late 1800s, with over a dozen recipes for rice waffles alone. For this post, I worked with a recipe from the 1897 “Up-to-Date Cookbook” via “Maryland’s Way”. Some recipes use rice flour or pulverize the cooked rice into the batter, but this one did not. Once again, authenticity went out the window in my ‘low-waste’ kitchen – in this case I used leftover wild rice. In 1897, the rice in question might have been something similar to the Carolina Gold rice profiled in great depth in “Southern Provisions.”
Even as rice cultivation in Maryland waned in favor of tobacco or corn, the Confederate-leaning Marylanders like cookbook author Jane Gilmor Howard may have had less ethical concerns about the consumption of the rice that was being transported by train from the South. Although she came from an abolitionist Quaker family, Elizabeth Ellicott Lea featured sixteen rice recipes in her cookbook “Domestic Cookery.” She may have had access to regionally grown rice, or perhaps she consumed with moral conflict.
Recipe:
- 2 Cups flour
- .5 Teaspoon salt
- .5 Teaspoon baking soda
- 2 eggs
- 2 Cups buttermilk
- .5 Cup cooked rice
- 1 Tablespoon melted butter, plus more for cooking
Sift together flour, salt and soda. Beat egg yolks and add to buttermilk. Add rice and butter. Combine buttermilk mixture with dry ingredients; then fold in well beaten egg whites. Bake in buttered waffle iron.
Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way, the Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook”
