The 1958 cookbook by the National Council of Negro Women, the “Historical Cookbook of the American Negro,” opens with a photograph of Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln, opposite recipes for the first of January: “Emancipation Proclamation Breakfast Cake” and “Western Beef Steak” from Denver. “The Emancipation Proclamation New Years’ Day, 1863, is celebrated in all parts of the United States. The Council recipes assembled from the six geographical regions have been taken from the oldest files of Negro families,” the book explains below the recipes.
The subsequent recipe, from Council Regions III and IV is for “Southern Hopping John.” No further explanations are needed for what this recipe means and where it is from. The caption instead points out the similarity to another recipe in the book, for Haitian “Plate National,” a similar dish of rice and beans enjoyed in Haiti, where Independence Day is January 1st. The book also includes a rice and beans recipe from Ghana. Together, the recipes imply a powerful message about food and heritage.
From Beef Broth to Banana Fritters, one of my favorite cookbooks to turn to for everyday recipes is “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County.” No book better encapsulates the range of delicious fare produced in the kitchens of Maryland’s home cooks.
As much as I love “Maryland’s Way” and “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland,” those books contain recipes from the state’s wealthiest families. The Canvasback Duck and Terrapin served in elite hotels and manors may have made our regional food famous, but the culinary talents behind those dishes was an outgrowth of the brilliant and humble cooking traditions captured in the “300 Years.”
Compiled in 1975 by “Citizens for Progress,” the book contains recipes from over 60 residents of St. Mary’s County. There is a history of stuffed ham included, with two different recipes. By far the most recipes were contributed by Theresa Young, whose daughter I spoke to a few years ago for this post.
Sometimes I feel like “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” is kind of a crutch – a very easy book to turn to when I want to focus on African-American cooking in Maryland. We (historians, Marylanders, whatever…) are very lucky to have a document like this.
On the other hand, the book really is so great that it deserves repeat readings (and cookings.) This time around, I made “Southern Sour Milk Biscuits,” attributed to Mary Helen Dove and Mary Taylor.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t definitively identify either person. It is possible that Mary Helen Dove was a woman who was born around 1897 and passed away in Baltimore in 1981.
A farming family’s home interior, Beachville, MD, 1940, Jack Delano, loc.gov
Whether or not that is true, I often find evidence that the extended families associated with “300 Years” had connections in Baltimore city. Some moved to the city later in life, others would visit with family in Baltimore during the summer. This suggests the influence that the unique culture of Southern Maryland has had on the city I call home.
The concept of urban versus rural implies a lot of arbitrary cultural differences that should be questioned, especially in light of the series of events that have displaced or hindered generations of farmers (black and white).
During and after the Civil War, many Confederates fled Maryland. One was Joseph Forrest, who was a captain of the “Fourth Maryland Light Artillery.” In 1864, Forrest’s abandoned land was seized by General Lew Wallace for use by the Freedmen’s Bureau.
“The purpose of the Bureau was to protect former slaves and provide living quarters and a livelihood where possible… These plantations were called ‘Government Farms.’ The only properties abandoned and seized in all of Maryland were in St. Mary’s County.” – Maryland Historic Trust
House and garden of William Sanders, Farm Security Administration Saint Inigoes, Maryland, Jack Delano 1940, loc.gov
All in all, the Freedmen’s Bureau in St. Mary’s County seized 3000 acres of land for 500 Black citizens to farm. When President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to the exiled Confederates who had once claimed the land, the white planters got to take the land back. Forrest was pardoned in 1865.
Most Black farmers were tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Those who were able to get land for themselves were often displaced by other circumstances, as in the heartbreaking case of the Dyson family.
My attempts to identify Mary Helen Dove or Mary Taylor entailed another viewing of “Now When I Look Back,” by Andrea Hamer, a book of oral histories and Farm Security Administration photos. I strongly recommend you get yourself to the Maryland Room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and spend some time with this book. It’s a meditation on history’s legacy, the earth’s bounty, perseverance, and community bonds. All of the things that make Maryland’s history – and our food – so fascinating.
Recipe:
2 Cups flour
.5 Teaspoon baking soda
1 Teaspoon baking powder
1 Teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoon shortening
1 Cup thick sour milk*
Sift together the dry ingredients. Cut in the shortening. Stir in the milk. Roll to 1/2″ thick on a floured surface. Cut, place on a greased or parchment-covered sheet. Bake at 425° for 15-17 minutes.
Modern pasteurized milk generally doesn’t get sour in an appetizing way. If it’s a little off it may be used. I used a mix of milk, yogurt, and beer and left it out overnight to get a nice ‘funk.’
Recipe adapted from “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County”
Cooking from “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” always provides an opportunity for excursions into some neglected aspects of Maryland cuisine (both regionally and racially). This week I made a simple recipe for a scalloped potato dish, a comforting winter side. The recipe author: Julia Courtney? I’ve tried my best. As I’ve mentioned before, St. Mary’s County has a web of surnames linking Black and White families to the region’s plantation past.
While there is a relative wealth of resources for learning about the families who contributed to “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County,” it’s not always so easy to connect the dots definitively.
As best as I can tell, Julia Courtney may be Julia Dorothy Courtney, born in 1905, and married to James Cornelius Courtney. Julia Dorothy and James Cornelius’ son Joseph married a woman named Julia Haskell, a woman from South Carolina. She too may be the originator of the recipe. To further confuse me, one of the interviewees in the Slackwater Archive oral histories, named Dorothy Courtney, ultimately appeared to be from a White watermen family, despite being right about the same age.
So I can’t turn up too much about Julia Courtney herself.
Nonetheless, I always welcome an excuse to revisit the oral histories and photos documenting the life of St. Mary’s county farming communities.
Julia Dorothy and James Cornelius Courtney are listed as a family of farmers in the St. Mary’s county censuses of the early decades of the 20th century.
Canned Vegetables in home of FSA borrower, 1941 photo John Collier, loc.gov
Farming was the primary listed trade at the time – especially for Black residents. Flipping through the pages of the 1930 census reveals farming families with all of the names found in “300 Years of Black Cooking…”; Dotson, Briscoe, Dyson, Dove, Courtney… While most heads of families are listed as farmers or farm laborers, and a few are listed as watermen, it is likely that many citizens labored in both industries to make ends meet.
In addition to the oral history transcriptions I found two books in the Pratt Library that put some of the oral histories and photo-documentation together. Andrea Hammer, the founder of the St. Mary’s County Documentation Project, edited two books documenting St. Mary’s County. “In My Time” focuses on the work of Black and White women including farming, seafood and midwifery. “But Now When I Look Back” showcases some Farm Security Administration photographs (as seen in the Edith Dyson’s crab-cakes entry.)
The photos reveal a farming community working together – sharing resources, building infrastructure, raising families.
James Bush with horse which is owned cooperatively by three farmers, 1940, photo John Vachon, loc.gov
Modern stereotypes all but erase the existence and history of Black farmers but there is patent absurdity to this. First and foremost is the fact that ancestors of many African Americans were captured and enslaved for the sole purpose of farming. In many cases, the enslaved were allotted gardens to grow food in their own time, essentially necessitating a life of farming upon farming.
In general, it makes little sense to presume that any one race or culture is more inclined to farming than another. The food we all eat comes from farms and this is the case in most of the world.
Industrial agriculture has made little room for small farmers in general, and as usual there are are historical barriers preventing Black Americans from getting a foothold in an already-challenging industry.
“For decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against Black farmers, excluding them from farm loans and assistance. Meanwhile, racist violence in the South targeted land-owning Black farmers, whose very existence threatened the sharecropping system. These factors led to the loss of about 14 million acres of Black-owned rural land—an area nearly the size of West Virginia.” – After a Century In Decline, Black Farmers Are Back And On the Rise, Leah Penniman
It takes a concerted effort to recover from such obstacles but there is movement in Maryland and beyond. In addition to the many urban farms and community gardens that aim to reconnect citizens with their food supply, more concerted efforts like the Black Dirt Farm Collective (Preston, MD) are working with churches and Public Health groups to address food deserts and revive Black agrarian culture.
That spirit of co-operation is not unlike that seen in some of the Farm Security Administration photographs. Sadly, many of the photos are lacking complete captions naming the participants.
Well installation in Ridge, MD 1941, photo John Collier, loc.gov
Many Farm Security Administration photos and oral histories depict crushing poverty that Saint Mary’s County residents faced amidst a life of grueling work on land and in water. Many families, according to “But Now When I Look Back,” eventually moved to Baltimore and elsewhere to seek a better life:
“Not many people now have gardens like they used to because they’re working… different jobs, and they don’t have time to work the gardens. Not as many people can things now. Most everything gets frozen. Not as many people put up jellies as they used to. But I still feel that if there was a need, everybody would rally around and help the person. The only difference is , now it seems to be if there’s a need. At that time, it wasn’t because there was a need. It was because “I want to.” People just went out spontaneously and did it. But it seems now the sharing and caring is there but is sort of dwindled down to, “If you need me I’ll be there and I’ll share.
Peel and slice the potatoes thinly. Place in a greased casserole dish, mixing with onions, and season with salt and pepper. Dot the potatoes with butter, and pour the milk over them. Bake very slowly in a 200° oven until brown and crispy on top, about 1 ½ hours.
Recipe adapted from “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County“
“In a year of low incomes from cotton, such as 1934, tenants speak of their [winter] store of sweet potatoes in terms which make it clear that they regard this store as life itself. A man’s sweet potatoes are his banked resources, his protection against starvation and destitution until advances begin in the spring.” – Natalie F. Joffe and Tomannie Thompson Walker, quoted in “Soul Food: The Surprising History of an American Cuisine”
Although sweet potato pie is now widely known as the ultimate sweet potato incarnation in soul food, the closely-related pone has had its share of appreciation in the recipe pages of newspapers such as the Afro-American and The New York Amsterdam News.
Many people are aware that sweet potatoes bear a similarity to yams, an unrelated but similar African staple. But according to “Soul Food: The Surprising History of an American Cuisine” by Adrian Miller, the candied/pie/pone treatment would be an atypical treatment for yams:
“Notably absent from West African cooking are past and present recipes or accounts of sweet yam dishes. Overall, nothing like the candied yam or a sweet potato existed in precolonial West African foodways. For West Africans, the idea of sugaring vegetables is nonsensical.”
The sweet treatment of sweet potatoes (which actually originate from Peru) was more influenced by ways that Europeans had been eating carrots, another root crop with similar possibilities. Historic cookbooks contain many recipes for carrot puddings that would be the forebear of sweet potato pudding or pone.
Carrot Pudding,
The London Art of Cookery, 1785
Nonetheless, sweet potatoes became an important staple in the diet of enslaved people. For some newly arrived slaves this may have originally been a preference due to the alternatives being either hard to digest or unpalatable. Miller writes, “Sweet potatoes were an integral part of plantation foodways, and poor whites ate them as well. Southern planters were effusive about the benefits of using the sweet potato crops for slave food. William Summer, a South Carolina planter, wrote in 1845, ‘Such is the partiality of the plantation negroes for potatoes, as an article of food, that as soon as the season for digging arrives, they prefer an allowance of root to any of the cereal grains.’”
This is another example, along with the extensive eating of vegetables such as greens, where the diets of the enslaved may have actually provided better nutrition than the ostentatious diets of the people who enslaved them.
“The fact that the sweet potato got African Americans through hard times enhanced its cultural value, and we see that elevated status in the way sweet potatoes were cooked by African Americans during slavery and after Emancipation,” writes Miller, “A ‘survival food’ is often considered undesirable, something that is only eaten during hard times. For sharecroppers, the opposite was true with sweet potatoes. Farmers spoke of them with almost spiritual reverence.”
So much so, in fact, that there is an exception to the West African indifference to sweet sweet potatoes: Liberia. A recipe search for Liberian Sweet Potato Pone will turn up a dish made from grated potatoes, sweetened with molasses and seasoned with ginger. It seems apparent that this recipe made its way to Liberia with the enslaved people who were freed and resettled there in the mid 1800s. The descendants of this population now make up only about 5% of the population of Liberia, but the country observes Thanksgiving on the first Thursday in November. An adaptation of American Thanksgiving, it is a day to celebrate freedom and independence, give religious thanks, eat roast chicken… and of course sweet potato pone.
Afro-American, 1973
I chose to make one of two Sweet Potato Pone recipes from “300 years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County,” contributed by Jane Dotson of “Dotsonville.” Internet searches don’t turn up a Dotsonville but there are many Dotsons living in and around Mechanicsville in St. Mary’s County.
Unlike recipes that use grated raw or cooked sweet potatoes, this one uses mashed potatoes. I lazily chose to roast the potatoes and puree them with an immersion blender. The resulting pone came out creamy and satisfying. Served à la mode with some cardamom ice cream, it was an absolute treat.
Most of us will thankfully not ever know the need to rely on one crop to keep us fed during the winter months. Still, the enduring affinity for sweet potatoes among those who did should be enough to remind us that these nutritious tubers deserve a place on the table throughout the season.
Recipe:
1.5-2 lbs sweet potatoes
1.75 Cups sugar
4 eggs
1 pinch of salt
.5 Teaspoons cinnamon
.5 Teaspoons vanilla extract
4 tb butter
Cook the sweet potatoes until tender. Peel, then beat with an egg beater, adding the other ingredients. (I used roasted potatoes and an immersion blender.) Beat until smooth. Pour into a buttered casserole dish and bake in a 375-400° oven until evenly browned. About 20-25 minutes (5 servings)
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.
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.
