The implication of that image, Ms Tipton-Martin explains, is that black chefs ”are simply born with good kitchen instincts diminishes knowledge, skills and abilities involved in their work, and portrays them as passive and ignorant labourers incapable of creative culinary artistry.” (This sort of false dichotomy often crops up in discussions of American sports too, in which black athletes are portrayed as naturally gifted and whites as diligent and meticulous.) Aunt Jemima was a racist archetype best known as the face of a line of breakfast foods: a plump, smiling woman in a kerchief, happily subservient in the kitchen. His book is part of a growing effort by African-American culinary historians to reckon with such debts. Six years ago, for instance, Toni Tipton-Martin, the first African-American food editor of a major-city newspaper (the Cleveland Plain Dealer) published “The Jemima Code”, which showcased two centuries of African-American cookbook authors. Mr Miller’s concern is that in recent years, as barbecue has grown trendy and its chefs acknowledged for their skill and artistry, America has failed to recognise “African-American barbecuers and what they’ve contributed to this hallowed culinary tradition”. When white colonists held barbecue feasts, the enslaved did the cooking, and also barbecued for themselves to mark holidays, weddings and other occasions. But Senegambians and Igbo people, who comprised a large share of enslaved Africans in the early 18th century, had traditions of salting and smoking meat. Native Americans were spit-roasting animals over shallow pits with heavy smoke when white colonists arrived.
Mr Miller is careful not to argue that African-Americans “invented” barbecue. Just one of the first 27 inductees to the Barbecue Hall of Fame was black, even though-as Adrian Miller marshals considerable evidence to show in “Black Smoke”, his thorough, scholarly, enjoyable study-barbecue is deeply rooted in African-American history and culture. In 2004 Paula Deen, a white Southern television personality, released an hour-long special on barbecue that featured black people cooking in the background, but none interviewed on camera.
In the summer of 2003, Bon Appetit, an American food magazine, ran a cover depicting “Who’s Who in American Barbecue”, featuring 19 cartoon figures, not one of whom was black. “THE BARBECUE stand, the fried pie and the fried fish sandwich, definitely Negro conceptions, are now the basis of large commercial enterprises dominated by others.” So lamented the Baltimore Afro-American, one of America’s longest-running African-American newspapers, in 1932.
University of North Carolina Press 328 pages $30 It will be of interest to scholars and students in cultural studies, film studies, French studies, history, and media studies.Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.
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