African American Food: Since Emancipation: The Civil War, Slave Cooks, and Emancipation

The coming of the Civil War did not end all the perils of the black community in the North, as was tragically illustrated by the 1862 New York draft riots, in which eleven were lynched and dozens more beaten. However, the outbreak of war did reduce the danger of being returned to slavery and opened some economic opportunities and, eventually, military service. The Civil War also helped spread African American culinary art and its reputation. Northern soldiers were welcomed into the homes of free people of color in the border states and parts of the South, where they enjoyed relief from hardtack and salt pork. Southerners were deprived of imported foods by the Union naval blockade, but they were pleasantly surprised by what their remaining slave cooks could create out of locally grown produce—foods like sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, hoppin’ John, collard greens, and hoecakes, which had been staples for centuries down in the slave quarters. The stereotype of the slave cook as mistress of the Big House kitchen has been backdated from the late nineteenth century, but its basis in fact arose only during the Civil War. Prior to that time, the role of slave cook was more often to prepare imported delicacies from recipes dictated by the mistress of the house.