Caribbean Influences on American Food: The United States Looks South

In the early nineteenth century, the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, Florida, and the Gulf Coast areas (west Florida), with their Caribbean-style foods and their newly assimilated cooks from Haiti. The Haitian Revolution had sent French colonists, free “Creoles of color,” and their slaves primarily to Francophone New Orleans but also as far north as Philadelphia, where the Haitian Creoles are thought to have introduced peanut brittle.

Although the legal slave trade ended in 1807, the short leg of the triangular trade continued as the United States supplied the Caribbean islands with salt cod and other foodstuffs for slaves and contract laborers in exchange for raw sugar and tropical fruit. The illegal slave trade, in which New Orleans is especially implicated, also tended to run through the Caribbean, because slavery remained legal in Cuba into the 1880s. The increasing tensions in Spanish Cuba produced some of the earliest Caribbean migrations to the United States in the form of Cuban cigar factories and their workers, established in Tampa and Key West, Florida, and East Harlem by the 1890s. Puerto Ricans went to Hawaii as sugar workers in the 1890s; some remained, contributing pasteles (plantain tamales wrapped in banana leaves), fried plantains, and fried pork rinds to Hawaiian “local food.” Others relocated to San Francisco. At about the same time, Bahamians migrated to Florida, especially to Key West and Miami.