By Tonia Moxley
The Roanoke Times
March 30, 2007
Summary: A slave cooking expert will share some recipes and knowledge today and Saturday.
BLACKSBURG — Growing up, Michael Twitty couldn’t understand why his grandparents grew tobacco and cotton on little plots in the city. Or why “people can remember the name of a watermelon they grew but can’t remember the names of their first cousins.”
Today he knows: “The experience of hand to earth to mouth is something you never forget. It’s in our DNA.”
But this curiosity still drives him as he works to trace his forebears, who were marched in slave coffles from the port of Richmond over the Blue Ridge Mountains and sold to plantation owners in Virginia, Alabama and South Carolina.
Slaves from those ships likely also ended up in present-day Blacksburg at Smithfield, as well as other Montgomery County plantations. Twitty has spent his career as a food historian tracking those ancestors through the foodways they brought with them, and their contributions to American cuisine.
“I always wanted to be as close as possible to my ancestors because they were calling me. They are still calling me,” said Twitty, director of interpretation at Maryland’s Menare Foundation. “A lot of people unfortunately ignore the voice of the past. I’m trying to heed it.”
He’ll share that journey today at a free talk at the Blacksburg library, and another at Virginia Tech. Twitty will also spend Saturday doing cooking demonstrations and talks for visitors to Historic Smithfield when it opens for the 2007 season. This year’s opening day celebration focuses on Colonial food techniques, culture and history — especially those of slaves. It is part of a push to expand the living history museum’s black history offerings.
Enslaved people made this plantation what it was, Smithfield Director Terry Nicholson said. Grant-funded research conducted a few years ago by Duke University professor Phillip Troutman unearthed some lost stories and names of slaves who lived there, including what is thought to be the household’s head chef, Sukey.
Sukey’s purview might have been the manor house’s basement kitchen where she would have tended stew pots in the hearth crowned with a 200-year-old chestnut beam harvested from the grounds.
Visitors can tour the house Saturday and see a display of the names of generations of slaves who lived and worked at Smithfield.
As for the food, Southern staples such as chitlins were not new to Africans brought in chains to Virginia in the 1700s, Twitty said. Okra was brought to America from Africa.
The fried black-eyed pea cakes favored by Mary Randolph of Richmond, author of arguably the most influential cookbook in American history, “The Virginia Housewife,” published in 1824, may have originated in present-day Nigeria. Twitty also emphasizes the contributions of Africans and African Americans to American horticulture, particularly the heirloom vegetables slaves and freed blacks cultivated in their own gardens. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson bought vegetables for his table from enslaved gardeners, Twitty said.
At home in Rockville, Md., Twitty cultivates those heirloom seeds, plantings from which will be included in the African American Heritage Garden at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.
Some of Twitty’s research into African and American slavery history has proved ground breaking to food and horticulture historians, according to Wesley Greene, garden historian at Colonial Williamsburg.
Twitty has written four manuscripts on slavery and food in Virginia and Maryland, and self-published one that’s available through his Web site.
He also works as a slave-life researcher at the Menare Foundation in Germantown, Md., which researches and teaches the history of the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses that helped free Southern slaves before the Civil War.
Twitty’s visit is partially sponsored by the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Committee, which oversees a collection of historic Virginia cookbooks at Virginia Tech’s Newman Library.
He’ll be back in Blacksburg in April for a weekend-long culinary history symposium “From Jamestown to the Blue Ridge,” organized by the committee.
On the Net: www.smithfieldplantation.org and www.menare.org
Copyright The Roanoke Times 2007
Tags: Appalachia, cooking, Slavery, Smithfield Plantation, Virginia, Virginia Tech