Catering to the Souls of Black Folk

Black intellectual W.E.B. du Bois (1868-1963) is not particularly known for his attention to foodways. Du Bois was one of the first African Americans to get a Ph.D. and he was a founding member of the NAACP in 1909. His pioneering sociological report titled The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) had highlighted the historical basis for enduring prejudice. He suggested that the consequences of prejudice included inequality and poverty. Although du Bois was among the leaders who favored a dignified response to the rampant racism, he believed in the attainability of aspirations by the “Talented Tenth,” the black aristocracy of urban cultural life, who would lead through their God-given talents and own perseverance. Born on the edge of slavery, du Bois would not live to see the Civil Rights legislation enacted in 1964.

Du Bois might have been surprised then to see his words taken as the title for a study of African American foodways: Dethroning the Deceitful Porkchop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama (University of Arkansas Press, 2015). Edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach, the volume’s contributions taken together remind us of the diversity within all food experiences, which can be categorized as personal (family), cultural (“ethnic”), regional, or even nationalist preferences. Food marks our achievements as much as it signifies our failures. The full quote from du Bois, by the way, is "The deceitful pork chop must be dethroned in the South and yield a part of its sway to vegetables, fruits, and fish." He was suggesting the ambivalence of feelings towards the foods of the enslaved. Exactly where did Soul Food fit into the narrative of Creole respectability?

In the years after the demise of plantation slavery, African Americans took their cooking skills to American cities in the Great Migration, seeking opportunity in the cauldrons of a newly emerging industrial society. One profitable outlet turned out to be the food catering business, which was monopolized by black men at the end of the nineteenth century. In his research for The Philadelphia Negro, du Bois went door-to-door in the city’s Seventh Ward, interviewing black families. A by-product of his research was a focus on the city’s catering guild. He discovered that black men from the American South and the West Indies had cornered the market on cooking for crowds. Black catering entrepreneurs like Robert Bogle, Peter Augustin, Thomas Dorsey, Henry Jones, and Henry Minton, were fashionable household names. Du Bois described them as “self-reliant, original businessmen, who amassed fortunes for themselves and won general respect for their people” (du Bois 1899, 33). The Philadelphia Times (October 17, 1896) called Dorsey, Jones and Minton “masters of the gastronomic art,” capable of perfection when it came to the “lobster salad, chicken croquettes, deviled crabs and terrapin [which] composed the edible display of every big Philadelphia gathering.” Their clients no doubt agreed. Over the course of a century, black cuisine had moved from the “pepper pot” of the late eighteenth century, made with tripe and cow foot and sold by African women on the streets of Philadelphia, to the respectable tables of city diners.