Setting the Welcome Table

"People would come into the restaurant and want to know where the ham hocks and navy beans were, and I'd have to tell them that we were Creole, and although we ate beans and we ate greens, we ate them a different way," she said. "Once they had our white beans and collards with garlic and ham, or our mustard greens with pickled pork and potatoes, they said `Oh, so that's what you mean.'

"Then I'd tell them about our Chicken Clemenceau, stuffed mirltons, flounder stuffed with crabmeat or our chocolate crepes and orange pecan pancakes. They didn't know black people cooked and ate these foods for themselves. They'd think we only cooked it for others."

Mrs. Chase, like residents of the Low Country, grew up eating fish and seafood because it was plentiful and available. I remember once visiting the Penn Center in South Carolina and walking along the edge of a marsh with a woman who grew up just outside Beaufort. She told of just how plentiful food was. "I didn't know we were poor until I went away to school and saw that other girls didn't wear dresses and skirts made from flour sacks" she said. "To us, being poor meant not having enough to eat. But we dug for oysters or caught crawfish just outside my back door. My brothers would catch catfish. Rice grew all around us. We grew our vegetables. I never knew what it was like to be hungry. If a neighbor had a cow, we traded milk for rice or fish."

In A Taste of Heritage, co-authors Joe Randall and Toni Tipton-Martin take recipes past soul food to a mainstream presentation of meals that could grace any table anywhere, but with intermittent indications of African American origins--most notably the recipe for Chit'lin Pizza on a Cornmeal Crust. The book, in addition to its 100-plus recipes, acknowledges a growing community of black chefs capable of creating exquisite meals from any culture.

Perhaps through these cookbooks and these meals and a better understanding of the role we've played in the evolution of good foods, a new generation of young people will come to understand themselves in a broadened historical context. Who knows, maybe with this understanding will come an interest in joining the ranks of cooks who are now fully acknowledged as chefs.

Holiday Menu

If you'd like a break from the same old turkey or ham and traditional sides, try, this menu, selected from cookbooks by black chefs.

Appetizer
Maryland Crab Cakes
(A Taste of Heritage)

Soup
Clear Tomato Soup
(A Gracious Plenty)

Salad
Italian Salad
(The Dooky Chase Cookbook)

Entree
Old Fashioned Roast Turkey
(A Gracious Plenty)

Sides
Casserole of Sage
Flavored Pork Tenderloin
(A Taste of Country Cooking)

Baked Onions Stuffed with Oyster Dressing
(Ideas for Entertaining from the African-American Kitchen)

Sauteed Collard Greens
(Low-Country Cookbook)

White Potato and Cheese Casserole
(Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine)

Bread
Sweet Potato Biscuits
(The Welcome ?able)

Dessert
Scripture Cake
(Vertamae Cooks)

Maryland Crab Cakes

From: A Taste of Heritage