by Josh Perkins, Prepared Foods Category Manager
Hercules Posey was an enslaved Black chef, regarded along with his family as the legal property of President George Washington. While details are hard to pin down in reading about his remarkable life, accounts seem to agree that he fled to freedom on Washington’s birthday in 1797 and died a free man. His family remained enslaved. Two months after his escape, the valet of Louis-Phillipe, future king of France, offered his condolences to Hercules’ youngest daughter, saying she must be very upset because she would never see her father again. She replied, “I am very glad, because he is free now.”
The mark Hercules left was of a gifted chef and a fanatic for cleanliness. His food was so good that he collected an auxiliary income of (in today’s money) about $5,000 a year by selling the leftovers, and he was allowed by Washington to walk the city at his discretion. Martha Washinton’s grandson recalled him as a “celebrated artiste.” You will find no mention of him in Hamilton (along with enslaved chef James Hemings, who was the first American to train as a chef in France and cooked the meal Hamilton and Jefferson met over to form the Compromise of 1790) and you’ll have a tough time finding mention of him on podcast or television show. You may have an even tougher time finding material on Emeline Jones, an emancipated chef, or George Crum, an African-American/Mohawk chef, but you have heard of the food each is variously credited with inventing—the potato chip.
In the recent rush of many businesses to respond to the death of George Floyd and the mass protests against racial injustice which spanned the globe, some overt symbols of cartoonish and demeaning renditions of Black people on food packaging have been removed, or changed. However, avoiding offense isn’t the same as according respect. The reality of American culinary culture is that black cooks and chefs have made a major contribution to what we know and love as a nation, and this should be well-known.
An important aspect of this contribution was, and is, the resourceful and skilled use of ingredients that were (are) not regarded as premium. In recent years, with the media explosion of culinary pursuits, this has become better-known and even exciting for those new to it. But, well before that, enslaved African-Americans needed to find ways to subsist on the cuts of meat their white owners had no taste for—like chitterlings, or chitlins, the prepared intestine of a pig or cow, or a cut that might be used to season—but not provide large portions of meat, like a ham hock (pig knuckle). Another was the introduction of crops from Africa to America, via ships plying the slave trade—among these being black-eyed peas and okra, now taken for granted as synonymous with Southern cuisine. Another of these that rivals the potato chip for fame and fortune; coffee.
A culinary memory that has stuck with me: Eating dinner at SavannahBlue in Detroit while in town on a job. The dining room is elegant and the atmosphere restrained. SavannahBlue enforces a dress code. And the shrimp and grits with andouille-mushroom gravy ranks up with the most satisfying things I’ve ever eaten. As the hour got on toward 9:00pm, the chef came out of the kitchen and I had the chance to say hello and thank him. It was the second time I had met a Black person at the head of their own kitchen, the first being a husband and wife Memphis BBQ team I worked for long ago. I’m sure this is partly a reflection of me, and where I have or haven’t been. But, watching the media currents that shine light on certain chefs and not others, such as the Food Network, African-American chefs hold two of twelve Featured Chef spots. Widening the list to all the chefs on the network, the percentage gets much lower. This could change, with a little less focus on celebrity status and more focus on culinary skill and innovation.
The full story of Black chefs and their influence on the food we know today as “Southern” and/or “Soul Food” is too much to fairly render in an article twenty times this length, not the least of reasons being that it is not finished. It isn’t easy to find, but it isn’t hard, either, not in the day of the internet. Take what’s here as an appetizer.