Why do black people love cornbread

She was a walking, talking instructional YouTube video when it came to baking technique, never giving you exact measurements, but instead, giving you the play by play of how an ingredient needed to be dealt with in order to gain the best result. One Sunday after hours of baking cornbread, I was assisting her in wrapping up loaves of cornbread for a church function in aluminum foil, of course , and my job was to wrap each loaf and write the names of the recipients.

Bake your own bread in a professional development class at ICE. Skip to main site navigation Skip to main content. View this post on Instagram. Add new comment You must have JavaScript enabled to use this form. Your name. More: The history of Black History Month. Reign says that if people are going to serve food to celebrate, there has to be an educational component to it. If you're going to serve cornbread or collard greens, then you should have open dialogue as to why you're serving cornbread and include some historical context to make it into a learning experience.

Discuss the history of that food as it pertains to black culture. Dennis adds that there are different black identities, and she challenges institutions to think critically and beyond the "lazy Kentucky Fried Chicken cornbread thing. Soul food has a rich and important history that ties Black culture to its African roots, and that history is deeply reflected in the staple recipes and techniques. It may surprise you to know that rice is not indigenous to the Americas.

In fact, many crops that are key ingredients in soul food cooking were nowhere to be found in the Western Hemisphere prior to the slave trade. During the Middle Passage, slave traders intentionally took several crops native to Africa and made limited portions of these foods available on the slave ships in order to keep the enslaved alive. Once in the Americas, the enslaved Africans grew these crops on the plantations as food sources that would keep their energy up during the long days of hard labor.

The transport of the African variety of rice in particular through the slave trade arguably set the foundation for the most notable southern American culinary traditions. Since rice is a staple in many African dishes, enslaved Africans adapted their cooking in the Americas with the food items that were most accessible, creating some of the most renowned soul food staples.

Today, we can still see clear similarities between one-pot rice recipes like jambalaya, and Jollof, a wildly popular traditional dish in many West African countries. The slimy green vegetable has a deep history, likely originating from Ethiopia. Historically, okra has been used as a soup thickener, a coffee substitute, and even as a material for rope. Okra is still used today in a variety of African soups, stews, and rice dishes, and the recipes vary widely from country to country.

While it is usually served fried in the Deep South, many are most familiar with okra as an ingredient in gumbo, a rich and savory stew usually consisting of some sort of meat or seafood, vegetables, and served with rice. Pork has been the choice meat in the South for centuries, and the preferred method of preserving the meat in the past was to salt and smoke it.

During the Atlantic slave trade, it was slaves who were frequently given the grueling task of preserving the meat. As a result, many of the techniques in curing meat are said to have been developed by African-Americans of the era.

As would be expected, the taste of these cuts of meat is not the best. So, to mask the poor flavor of the meat enslaved people drew from their traditional African cooking and used combinations of seasonings on their meat. A mixture of hot red peppers and vinegar was very common, and this flavoring has served as the base of many different barbecue sauces that are still used in the South. Nowhere is this practice most common than in African countries, where the selection of leafy green vegetables is unparalleled.

Yellow cornmeal was cheap, though. So black cooks who had little money may have changed their cornbread to match the cornmeal they could afford.

Hayes, the cornbread called for 1 tablespoon sugar. Martin thinks black cooks were influenced by those. As Purvis further acknowledges, contemporary palettes have both White and Black folks crossing over the cornbread line however for many White Southerners, the distinction runs a bit more personal.

Actually, the cake-not-cornbread line may have originated with cookbook author Ronni Lundy.