Bound to the Fire

How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine

Kelley Fanto Deetz

• Éditeur: The University Press of Kentucky
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813174754
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: African American Studies

For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.

Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon knowledge and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history by uncovering their rich and intricate stories and celebrating their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.

One

IN HOME

Standing the Heat

SURRY COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1860

It was the eve of the Civil War, and Sookey went to bed every night thinking about the labor of her days. Cooking on a Surry County plantation was a stressful task that occupied all of her five senses and consumed almost every moment of her life. She provided several meals a day to the white family who enslaved her and to whomever came to visit. Food was more than sustenance; it was at the core of Virginia hospitality. Her friends in the field worked from sunup to sundown, while Sookey remained bound to the fire in the big house’s kitchen twenty-four hours a day. She was forced to cook multiple meals that were both scheduled and spontaneous. Up every day before dawn, Sookey baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and prepared divine feasts for the evenings. She roasted meats, made jellies and puddings, and created desserts for every free person who passed through the plantation.

Sookey lived in the kitchen; she slept upstairs above the hearth during the winters and often moved outside come summertime. Her children learned to cook and work in the big house and were always under the watchful eye of the white family. Private moments were rare, as was the ability to truly rest. She rose early to bake, cooked all day, and went to bed with the next day’s menu both in her mind and on the large hearth on the first floor of her kitchen quarters. Cooking for a Virginia plantation was a challenging task, one that required culinary talents, nuanced social skills, and physical strength. The labor was intense—lifting huge pots of water, standing for hours by the open fire. Her workday bled into the night, with no space for respite. Sookey was a typical enslaved cook and undoubtedly worked herself to death. Cooking provided her and her family with a unique status within the bonds of enslavement, but it came at a high price. In 1860 Sookey died at age fifty from a hemorrhaged womb, likely caused by overexerting herself for the sake of Virginia’s famous hospitality.

Sookey was born near the banks of the James River sometime around 1810, two years after the United States withdrew from the transatlantic slave trade. She was about twenty years old when Nat Turner organized and executed his revolt in nearby Southampton County and transformed the culture of slavery. Fear, abuse, and control plagued Virginia’s plantation communities. Sookey was central to one of the most turbulent eras in American history. Her role as a cook subjected her to the direct gaze of white Virginians at a time when enslaved folks were increasingly involved in plotting insurrections and poisoning their enslavers. The black body represented strength, anger, and a complex dependency. Part of this dependency rested firmly on Virginia’s dining room tables. Southern hospitality relied almost exclusively on enslaved domestic labor. Sookey was burdened with an incredible responsibility, as her skills solidified the reputation of her enslavers and that of Virginia as a whole. Guests wrote countless missives about the meals they ate while visiting Virginia, often attributing the food to the mistress of the house. Although these white women may have helped design the menus or provided some of the recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia famous for its culinary fare.

CHARLES CITY COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 2016

Grand plantations pepper the landscape along Virginia’s Route 5. To drive through rural Virginia is to gaze back into the nineteenth century; it is visually striking and has remained mostly untouched over the past 150-plus years. The homes of Virginia’s elite white families have held up over time, while the slave quarters have been demolished or allowed to fall back into the earth. The more you know about the history of these buildings, the more it hurts when you see slave quarters destroyed. These buildings are direct reminders of the people who called them home. Their walls speak volumes across generations, and they remind us that the ancestors persevered. They are like tombstones marking the lives of millions of enslaved Africans throughout the diaspora, and when they stand tall, they invite questions about and inspire answers to one of the darkest moments in history. Their vanishing only reinforces the idea that such places do not matter and that these homes—symbols of pain and survival—are unworthy of preservation, memory, and respect. These buildings are where enslaved folks created families against incredible odds, and they are essential parts of the American story.

Plantation kitchens, though built with slightly better materials than the average slave quarters, are also reminders of those who dwelled inside. Once you see these architectural skeletons, they are impossible to unsee. To perceive a landscape as a window into the past is to welcome an understanding of both the history of slavery and its legacies. The built environment is our connection to the past, and the surviving kitchen quarters are invaluable resources in understanding Virginia’s enslaved plantation cooks.

THE PLANTATION KITCHEN

By the end of the seventeenth century, Virginia was experiencing a critical ideological shift. The concept of race, a social construct to explain physical differences and promote white supremacy, began to take root. The influx of indentured servants, juxtaposed with a growing reliance on enslaved African labor, directly influenced Virginia’s vernacular architecture. Plantations transformed rapidly, reflecting emerging and changing views on race. This shift is clearly visible in the evolution of kitchens within the larger cultural landscape. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Virginia’s plantation kitchens mirrored the greater social environment and the position of enslaved cooks within the larger plantation community. By the turn of the twentieth century, the legacy of this racialized space was transferred directly into modern kitchen spaces, and it continues to inform our collective memory of cooks and their roles in society.

People build things that make sense to them, and such structures represent the builders’ ideological perspectives. Architectural historian Dell Upton considers “landscape as [an] extension of ideological process.”¹ This view enables a critical evaluation of space and place as markers of social customs, mores, and materializations of cognitive patterns. Therefore, examining kitchens within the larger context of plantation landscapes uncovers the centrality of this designated space in Virginia’s plantation culture. Why were kitchens built the way they were, and how did they change over time? How did this transition reflect ideas about race and place, and how did it ultimately affect the enslaved cooks who lived and worked inside these buildings? To understand the people who occupied these buildings, we must start with the physical world they lived in.

Virginia, like many of England’s colonies, was a microcosm of Britain. However, its individuality was seasoned by local environments, resulting in a distinctly Virginian tradition. In the early seventeenth century Virginia planters owned relatively small dwellings, compared with their typical eighteenth-century mansion-style homes. “These were one-and-a-half-story frame structures with one or more rooms on each floor.”² The kitchen consisted of a hearth in the common room, and it was part of the shared social space of the household. Vernacular house forms in Virginia began as varieties of English house plans. By the end of the seventeenth century, they had become explicitly Virginian and housed common folk as well as elites.³ This distinctly Virginian house was based on a combination of the colonists’ need to culturally reproduce English architecture and the local frontier needs of the Virginia landscape.

With the increased reliance on enslaved Africans and indentured servants, Virginia planters began to evaluate the social strata. “Increasingly in the period 1660–80, planters moved servants and slaves to separate buildings, creating a definite spatial division where no clear social one existed, and built smaller houses for themselves.”⁴ A major ideological turning point came in 1676, when Bacon’s Rebellion—an attempt by poor whites and enslaved Africans to overthrow the local government—influenced elite planters to reevaluate the class-based social strata.⁵ As a result, Virginia’s elite began the strategic ideological promotion of white supremacy. This divide-and-conquer technique succeeded in breaking the burgeoning rebellious spirit and, in turn, transformed a class-based society into a racially conscious Virginia where blacks were enslaved. By the late seventeenth century, the planters’ choice of small houses and outbuildings for servants and slaves reflected the growing social separation between master and servant.⁶

This increasing racial consciousness was transferred to the cultural landscape as planters began to divide spaces into distinct categories. The idea of “otherness” informed the architectural plans of Virginia’s plantations. “Elite whites, carefully orchestrated exercise in the definitions of space, delineating two spaces: white and black/poor white.”⁷ The most significant example was the advent of the external kitchen. “They also built a separate kitchen, a separate house for the Christian slaves, one for the negro slaves.”⁸ “The addition of new rooms reflected an analytical desire for order and separation that grew out of and amplified the seventeenth-century division of servant and served spaces.”⁹

This division of space was noted in 1705 by Robert Beverly, who stated: “All their drudgeries of Cookery, washing, daries, etc., are perform’d in Offices detached from their Dwelling-Houses, which by this means are kept more cool and sweet.”¹⁰ Plantation museums rely on this quotation to explain the phenomenon of kitchens being erected outside of the main house. It is a sterile way of justifying white Virginians’ decision, after a turbulent quarter century, to erect separate buildings to house enslaved cooks and the equipment they needed to furnish food for white families. It is no more than a mythical romanticizing of the past to think that, in an era when bathing was infrequent and there were fireplaces in every room, removing the kitchen would improve the smell of the home and reduce the fire risk. It simply does not add up. Plantation kitchens, which began inside the common space of the typical two-room house, were moved to external locations to physically separate the servants from the served, creating a mental template that defined otherness.¹¹

THE EXTERNAL KITCHEN

“Separating the kitchen from the main plantation house was one of several related architectural gestures that signaled the onset of a more rigid form of chattel slavery that would persist until the middle of the nineteenth century.”¹² Seventeenth-century Virginian planters continued to live in rather small dwellings, while their servants moved into separate domiciles. “In the early eighteenth century, small houses of this general character served even the wealthiest segments of the population.”¹³ Hall and parlor houses became increasingly popular, and within twenty-five years, most of Virginia’s elite had adopted the house form known as the Georgian-style house.

This architectural transformation paralleled Virginia’s evolving social traditions. Builders adapted to the planters’ desire for compartmentalized spaces and for a particular flow throughout their homes.¹⁴ At the turn of the eighteenth century, and with the racial caste system in place, Virginians began to upgrade their material style. At this point, British domestic buildings were undeniably influenced by architectural greats such as Vingboons, Palladio, and Serlio. Virginians, however, had a hand in creating their own culturally specific architectural formation, a combination of local and extralocal influences on the Georgian style.¹⁵ In the 1930s scholar Dixon Wector interviewed Marian Cater of Shirley Plantation, who told him that the kitchen was separate from the house “since no matter what the hazard of cold dishes, the gentry of Virginia believed that cooking had no business under the same roof as eating.”¹⁶ This is a break from the typical p...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: In Myth
• 1. In Home: Standing the Heat
• 2. In Labor: Cooking for the Big House
• 3. In Fame and Fear: Exceptional Cooks
• 4. In Dining: Black Food on White Plates
• 5. In Memory: Kitchen Ghosts
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index