Black cooks created the feasts that gave the South its reputation for hospitality --- How Enslaved Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine | History | Smithsonian

“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine. Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

First line: Create a racist narrative.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day.

Incendiary rhetoric

They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime.

so they worked in the kitchen but never slept in the room, therefore not living there.

Hypocritical reporting:

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage.

yet:

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries.

and

But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books.

True racism:

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root

Nothing has a positive spin anymore. Everything is negative and jaundiced. May we remember the recipes used were English, French, Italian, Spanish, Scandanavian...etc...etc...etc... Oh gee I forgit. Marse Prezdint did lub his big ol'plate of hoppin' john and fried chitterlins'!