Braided Heritage

Three is a Magic Number

Establishing the American Braid

What is America? The name itself is contentious, taken from an Italian explorer and used to define two continents that were already occupied by whole civilizations. In the United States, we consider ourselves Americans, but Canadians, Mexicans, and Brazilians are also “Americans” in the original sense. The politics of the past years have told us that the United States are anything but united. So, in penning an American cookbook, I ask: How to define the country of my birth? In the 1950s when I went to school, it would have been much simpler, in a sense, as I would have hewed to the then-textbook definition that spoke of Columbus, Washington, Founding Fathers, and Indians. Back then, the white cowboys were contrasted with brown Indians, who spoke like Tonto (think of that name!) and were called things like Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring. African Americans, if considered at all, were graciously accorded George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, and enslavement was glossed over in images of white-pillared houses and cotton fields. We have come far, even though there is much more road to travel. The question remains, and in fuller terms: How to define the foundational cultures of this diverse, dynamic, and difficult-to-parse country?

As I pondered this question, I remembered years ago there was a Saturday morning television cartoon show called Schoolhouse Rock! The show taught grammar and eventually civics and mathematics. They had songs that served as devices with which to initiate the teaching process. My favorite was, “Three Is a Magic Number.”

Three is indeed a magic number. It is the number that the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria attribute to the trickster orisha, Elegba (Ellegua or Ellegbara), the deified ancestor and owner of the crossroads who has been known to deceive the unsuspecting. Three is an important number in the Christian church: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Even in matters culinary there are references made to varying Holy Trinities of seasonings and spices. The more I thought, the more I realized that three is also a magic number when referring to the United States and its history.

The early, original foodways of this country are the result of an intricate braiding of three overarching cultures: Native American, European, African. The result, as we all know, is savory and varied indeed. Each brought much to the bubbling cauldron of cultures that would spawn the nation’s food. Native peoples maintained traditions of innovative agriculture as well as highly developed skills in hunting and foraging. Europeans brought the nascent culinary impulses that would form the national cuisines of the four colonizing countries: Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and France. The Europeans are also the people responsible, in a sense, for the third strand in the braid: They enslaved the Africans, who came with agricultural knowledge and skills in animal husbandry and in growing key foods, as well as their own culinary techniques.

I am well aware, I should note, that when I speak of three cultures in terms of generic Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, I am committing a grievous fault because each of those overarching cultures has multiple unique subdivisions and each of those has its own specificities, history, culture, foodways, and more. But as on the African continent, there can be some general ideas drawn from the differing culinary cultures of the Asante and the Yoruba, the Kikuyu, the Fon, the Wolof, Khoi, and more. The same, in general, can be said for differences among the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch of the time, and of the distinctions between the Cherokee, and Miwok, the Wampanoag, the Shinnecock, and the Paiute, to name a few. However, the vastness of the part of the North American continent that would become today’s United States of America, the broad nature of the general topic, and a general oh-so-United States-ian ignorance of history unfortunately, lends itself all too well to generality.

Perhaps, though, that can be a good thing, in that it forces a look back at former assumptions, and a look at the very nature and fluidity of history. A few reorienting suggestions should suffice. (This is a cookbook, after all.)

Let’s begin by resetting the notion of history. It is now generally accepted that Paleo-Indians crossed the land bridge over the Bering Strait onto the continent that would be named North America considerably more than fifteen thousand years ago. They were the first humans to arrive on the land mass that would become the United States, and they made it theirs. They settled homelands, established trade routes, and created myriad cultures, many of which endure until this day. In general compass, their religious traditions did not support the notion of ownership of land, but instead placed the accent on community and continuity. The sacredness of land—and what grew and roamed on it—was an almost universal concept among these societies. The land was there for all, and its bounty was a blessing that was bestowed upon the people. Farming practices were established, hunting grounds were decided, culinary traditions were formed. All of these were well developed long, long before the Europeans set foot on the continent.

Up until recently, those traditions were rarely counted in the American narrative. In 1974, culinary historian Evan Jones entitled the first chapter in his book American Food: The Gastronomic Story, “Puritans and Plantations,” as if American food started with the Pilgrims. That book—and that common perspective, indeed the one taught to me in my childhood history classes— further flattens the story by telling it solely from the British point of view, beginning with the Jamestown settlement and the landing on Plymouth Rock. It was never mentioned that years before Sir Walter Raleigh tried to settle the lost colony of Roanoke in 1590, before Jamestown was established in Virginia in 1607, and long before the Pilgrims landed in 1620, the Spanish had already established the city of Saint Augustine in Florida in 1565. The Dutch were also here and had established New Netherland in the area that would become New York in 1614—after Jamestown, but before Plymouth. The French were relatively late into what would become the United States; they initially came as trappers and explorers and arrived in large numbers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Still their relationships with the other two original American groups—Native Americans and African Americans—were rarely if ever mentioned in those history lessons, and were certainly complex.

Similarly, it has already been written that the first Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, a year before the Mayflower, but those enslaved Africans were not the first on this land; they were merely the first ones arriving in the British colonies. There were already Africans, and their descendants, in the Spanish colonies with records showing that there were fifty-six enslaved in Saint Augustine in 1602. By 1626 there were also enslaved Africans living in Dutch New Netherland, who made up a sizeable portion of the community. The French had a different relationship with enslavement. Early on, they enslaved large numbers of Indigenous people, many of whom were vanquished members of rival tribes gifted to them as tribute by Natives. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, those enslaved by the French were in large majority Africans and their descendants.

By the year 1776, the place that would become the United States of America was not just about Pilgrims and plantations, but was an increasingly rich mixture of Native Americans from large swaths of the Eastern seaboard, multiple European communities of different classes, and Africans from western and central parts of that continent eating foods as diverse as corn pone, okra soup, and bean pottage. And we begin to see those foods come together.

This then is the American braid. Acknowledging the existence of many hands and many cultures and many ways of growing, hunting, fishing, and foraging and cooking, serving, and eating of necessity, changes the picture of the formation of the American pot.