Photo by Sean Garcia, Washington University in St. Louis
Rafia Zafar
Rafia Zafar
Rafia Zafar is fascinated by food. Not so much preparing it—her husband’s the whiz in the kitchen, and she’ll pull out her phone to show you photos of his sourdough baguettes. What interests Zafar is food as a venue: an arena of entrepreneurship, cultural expression, relationship. Professor of English, African and American studies, and American culture studies at Washington University, she grew up in a part of Harlem that was African-American (like her father) with a kosher butcher and a handful of residents who were Jewish (like her mother). It was her grandmother, though, who taught her to shake chicken in a bag of flour and sip the pot likker from collard greens. When Zafar became an academic, she began to think hard about where that food came from—and what it meant. Digging into old cookbooks, guides, pamphlets, and novels, she pieced together stories of the black gastronomy that slid, barely recognized, into our collective heritage. Early cookbooks had to be written with only the slightest hint that the author was African-American; guidebooks were written, ever so tactfully, by black butlers who were teaching middle-class whites how to behave.
In Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, you write about Arturo Schomburg, who set out to recognize the “negro genius” by putting together a culinary compendium—but never finished. Tough project?
How do you reconstruct the creativity of black cooking when—because they were forbidden to read or just because of the wretched state of black education after the Civil War—people had to pass food cooking styles down by word of mouth? Thomas Jefferson’s chef, James Hemings, was French-trained. Jefferson wouldn’t free him until he had trained his successor. And Hemings was essentially his brother-in-law.
What surprised you, as you began your research?
Particularly with the earlier books, you really have to dig to find anything that’s quote-unquote black. Robert Roberts and Tunis Campbell were black men, members of an oppressed and maligned minority, who were writing these hospitality guides [House Servant’s Directory or a Monitor for Private Families by Roberts, 1827, and Hotel Keepers, Head Waters, and Housekeepers Guide by Campbell, 1848] that whites would buy and then use to leverage their own social status. One of those books was in [the library of a Confederate officer], and people didn’t buy a lot of books back then! So black people were telling white people how to be high-class.
What became of Roberts and Campbell?
Roberts was a butler, and had to put on a public neutral face, but he was also an abolitionist. Campbell was a hotelkeeper; he ends up in Georgia as an elected official during Reconstruction. They were leveraging skills they gained as managers. To use the linguistic metaphor, they had to code-switch.
You also tell us about Abby Fisher, the second African-American woman to publish a cookbook. How did she handle race?
She doesn’t say anything at all. She has that funny intro where she kind of winks and says I’ve made things so explicit even a child could follow—in other words, even a middle-class white woman. She makes only the briefest references to plantation life, but you have to understand who she is as a black woman to understand her boast: “I have given birth to 11 children and raised them all.”
Tell me about your grandmother’s food.
It’s funny, because she wasn’t a great cook. She was a decent cook, and she knew how to do a few dishes well: fried chicken, biscuits, oxtails, collard greens, of course. She liked Miller High Life in the 7-ounce bottles. And she’d serve me something called Monks’ Bread, this dense white bread she’d toast and then butter all the way to the corners.
What do you mean by the phrase “the taste of necessity”?
You come to love what you’ve got. Doctors and lawyers sneak out on their families to get their chitlins. Their children and spouses do not want that stuff in the house. But even if it’s poverty, it’s the taste of being loved.
Do you make your grandmother’s greens?
I make them vegan, with olive oil, toasted sesame oil, liquid smoke, and crushed red pepper—and you can add some hot sauce. It still has that good mouthfeel.
How much of American cuisine is African?
Watermelon, coffee, okra, cola nuts—all Africa. It’s only in the last 10 or 15 years that people have been acknowledging how black diasporic American food is. “Gumbo with okra and filee”—“gumbo” is a West African word for okra, a vegetable from West Africa that’s a thickener. And filé powder is sassafras, which is native American. You have all this mixing of influences. I was once going to give a paper called “What’s So Black About Mac ’n’ Cheese?” It might go back to James Hemings. Thomas Jefferson is said to have popularized pasta—though the early cookbooks suggested washing it and cooking it for an hour, can you imagine?
Nope. But I can’t imagine liking okra, either.
You haven’t had my okra. You have to wash and dry it before you cut it—top and tail it, then cross-slice it into little circles. Then you put it in a little olive oil with garlic and sauté till crispy.
I learned so much in your book about George Washington Carver. What would he have said about today’s food deserts and the difficulty of finding quality?
I think he’d just roll up his sleeves and get to work. He was saying “farm to fork” in the late 19th century. Popups and food trucks? The Jesup wagon was a cooking school on wheels. The man was more than peanuts.
You say Harriet Beecher Stowe kind of misled us with her depiction of black female cooks?
Just because of how slavery was gendered, black males could also be in the kitchen; they would have likely had more access to literacy. The Gone with the Wind stereotype, the black woman dominatrix in the kitchen, most slaveowners did not have that kind of setup. If you just had a few slaves, you couldn’t spare someone to do just the cooking. The now popular image was a desire, a fantasy [the black woman in the white kitchen] that became more common just because of the limited opportunities for African Americans after Emancipation.
Economic and racial injustice weave through so many stories about food.
Did you ever see Imitation of Life, with Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers? Fannie Hurst, a Wash. U. grad, wrote the book; it’s an Aunt Jemima story. Two single mothers who come together. Colbert’s character is just going on and on about how great Louise’s pancakes are, and she says, “Oh, well, that’s my secret recipe.” Flash forward to the end: They’re living in this mansion. And in one of the last great shots, Claudette Colbert is going upstairs, and Louise Beavers is going downstairs.
That reminds me of Tom Bullock, the African-American bartender at the St. Louis Country Club who was championed by George Herbert Walker, grandfather and great-grandfather of the Bush presidents.
Bullock was so reserved. The very model of the bartender who will listen to people and never say anything about himself. There was an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch saying that Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t possibly have restrained himself to just a few sips of one of Bullock’s mint juleps. But Bullock [author of a 1917 cocktail guide, The Ideal Bartender] never said a word. It shows the complexity of what resistance is. When I was young and had my Angela Davis hair and wire-rimmed glasses, we took over the Food Science Building at Pratt. I remember stirring the pot of revolutionary soup—except I burned it! Octavia Butler was once talking to a friend who said, “If I’d lived in slavery, I would have strangled the Man.” But Octavia knew from her own working-class experience that it’s not that easy. You have to be alive to resist.
Why dig up the gastronomic past?
When Schomburg was in school, a teacher said to him, “No one is going to pay any attention to black people, because they don’t have a history.” That’s what built the Schomburg library. He said, “I know we have a history.”
Zafar will discuss Recipes for Respect at 4:30 p.m. April 18 in Washington University's John M. Olin Library, Room 142. The event is free to attend.
