Rouses Everyday - May & June

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AFRICAN
T here’s no more hotly debated
word in the Gulf Coast region
than “Creole.” From a Portuguese
term, “crioulo” originally referring to an
enslaved person of African descent born
“in house,” so to speak, the term is imbued
with multiple meanings and interpretation.
Creole has also referred to the descendants
of Europeans with an American provenance
— but rarely refers to the ways in which
many of those European Americans were
shaped by Afri-Creole cultures in a wider
African Atlantic world born in the age of
mercantilism and shaped by slavery. Perhaps
even more debated than the origins and
meaning of “Creole” is the definition and
discussion of the origins of Creole cuisine.
In the genealogy of Creole foodways, the
father may be French-Spanish, with a Native
American grandfather tucked away on both sides — but the mother
isWest and Central African to the bone.Who is she?Where does she
come from? Why does she matter? One thing is absolutely certain,
the African representation is more than just “gumbo”.
One year after the establishment of New Orleans, the new colony
requests three important elements: enslaved Africans, several
barrels of rice seed, and enslaved Africans who knew how to grow
it. The initial enslaved group came out of Ouidah, the homeland
of the Vodun religion, a kingdom in the southern part of modern
day Benin where rice was grown along with corn, sweet potatoes,
melons, and vegetables like onions, hot peppers, tomatoes and okra.
The Hueda, Fon, Ehve, and Yoruba among them brought a love of
hot spicy food, hot sauces, fritters — savory and sweet — including
akara –made from black-eyed peas or rice. In Creole mouths, akara
became “cala,” sold piping hot on the streets of New Orleans.
The true masters of riziculture arrived with successive waves of
Senegambians — the Bamana, the Manding, settled Fula, Wolof,
Serer, Balanta and others.These were also fishermen, cattlemen, and
masters of trade. Senegambian culture came to define Louisiana
from Bouki stories to talk of gris-gris to soups made of okra and rice
dishes like jambalaya and jambalaya au congris and stews made of
seafood. In Haiti, it was Senegambians and their Kongo neighbors
who gave birth to the Monday laundry dish par excellence, red
beans and rice.
The Kongo-Angolans after centuries of trade and engagement
with the Portuguese had long embraced a number of crops
from the West and they spread a unique culture and cuisine
“creolized” long before they left Africa. Many forget that enslaved
Africans often worked as cooks for Europeans long before their
American arrival. Some of those cooks were sent from Louisiana
to France, and others were trained in New Orleans. Just like a
word of Kongo origin, “jazz,” the people of Kongo-Angola, gave
the city and it’s culture another word, “gumbo,” a term for okra.
Because of this distinct heritage, Creole cuisine has a West and
Central African culinary grammar as well as a need
to resurrect the forgotten black cooks that were, a century ago,
widely praised.
Our ancestors were the first people in human history to have
a powerful legacy to protect, and it’s as ancient as humanity itself.
Slavery has existed throughout world history. But Africans are
the only group to revolutionize everything about their enslavers,
to change the entire culture — the food, the music, traditions and
much more. The idea that certain dishes in the Creole canon are
European in origin with African additions should be switched.
Jambalaya didn’t come wholesale from paella, from Spain. It
came from Africa and had European cooks and ideas added to it.
Boiled peanuts in every Southern gas station? That’s Senegal. Fried
plantains, cala, catfish, turtle, it’s all a part of a narrative that sings
of West and Central Africa.
We have to appreciate the skills and techniques these cooks had
to bear. They rose by 4:30 and often didn’t sleep nearly until
midnight. Breakfast by 7 or 8, dinner by 2 or 3, the evening meal by
7 or 8. They had to master French culinary technique, marry them
with African and Native American ingredients and know every
step of the process — from the selection of wood, care of utensils,
to shopping in the market and the production of food from the
ground up.
We have to change our perspective on the African cultural and
culinary legacy in the New World — especially in melting pot
crucibles like New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, where Creole
food was born. It was the translation of many heritages into one that
was their greatest accomplishment and speaks to their conversation
about identity — Who will we be? How will we be? Who will our
children become?
Michael Twitty was the keynote speaker
at Dillard University’s Black Hand in the Pot
culinary conference this April. The conference
was put together by the Dillard University
Ray Charles Program in African American
Material Culture, a premier program that
teaches students and the community about
New Orleans cuisine. Twitty is a food writer,
independent scholar, and culinary historian
and historical interpreter personally charged
with preparing, preserving and promoting
African American foodways and its parent
traditions in Africa and her Diaspora and its
legacy in the food culture of the American
South. Follow him on Twitter @Koshersoul.
His food blog can be found at http://
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