African American Food: To The Civil War

There are multiple aspects to African American foodways, and a survey of them requires an examination of the homelands in Africa, where various aspects of African American culture originated; some of the foods of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century African kitchen; the introduction of the African cook to what became the United States; the early African American cookbook authors; and the Big House cooks on southern plantations versus the field hand cooks.

Almost all present-day African Americans are descended from people originating from the tip of Senegal around the coast of West Africa, across the highlands of Cameroon to western Congo and northern Angola. The area includes such present-day coastal nations as Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and the Cameroon, as well as inland areas from which people migrated or were brought to the coast.