(calm music) - [Narrator] Michael Twitty is a culinary historian, a James Beard Award-winning writer and educator, focused on connecting the dots between food, history and culture with a special focus on African American food traditions.

He was inspired as a child by a trip to Colonial Williamsburg and later came back working as an interpreter in this living museum telling the culinary story of the food that sustained a young nation.

- This would be less mature than that one.

- I'm gonna do this one.

- Okay.

- Yep.

We're also making sweet potato pumpkin also known as cushaw and that's the big striped pumpkin you see over there.

It's originally from the West Indies and was brought to the American South by enslaved Africans.

Food is a vehicle for conversation.

Food is a a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and our neighbors on a much deeper level.

Well, I think when it comes to southern food, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it just came out of nothing.

The reality is is that southern food is a result of multiple historical and cultural collisions, particularly between Europe, Africa and Native America.

When it comes to people of African descent, these extremely powerful notes that food is how we pass in our culture.

Food is how we resisted enslavement and oppression and food is how we shut our agency.

It wasn't, it wasn't passive.

One of the things that gets me the most concerned is when people refer to African American vernacular food ways as sort of like what was given to us.

No, it's what we created for ourselves and for others.

So I think it's incredibly empowering to learn about that tradition from the historic side the way I do here at Colonial Williamsburg.

Field peas, black-eyed peas, we think of them as something you just eat for good luck on New Year, something that fills the bill at a meat and three.

Black-eyed peas, your Greek and sweet potatoes and your meat.

Well, it's deeper than that.

When I went to Senegal, West Africa, I went to Goree Island which is where enslaved people were prepared for shipment to the new world including some of my own ancestors.

And the last remaining slave castle, the Maison des Esclaves, they explained to us that black-eyed peas were one of the foods that were given to enslaved Africans cooked in palm oil to fatten them up.

One thing about sweet potatoes is that in the West Indies, anywhere they were boiling sugar, they were really quick energy food and when the men would go to the sugar boiling house, their job was to pour the sugar all night long.

Talking about long ladles, molten hot cane syrup that becomes molasses and then it becomes fermented into rum which of course will then cross the ocean by more enslaved people and feed a triangular trade.

But what happens is while they're cooking this, the syrup down all night, they're dumping some of it over top of a iron pot filled of sweet potatoes.

What does that sound like to you?

It sounds like candied yams.

And they would eat that to keep them up all night 'cause they had to be up all night.

It was a high energy snack.

Every time you eat candied yams now, I want you to think about an enslaved man in their sugar boiling house all night long, making that dish happen as a means to stay awake.

I'm not interested in recipes.

I'm not interested in formulas.

I don't think about food and cooking other people do.

I think of it in terms of big Black ideas.

The ultimate is to create something that tastes good.

Dude, that's the best black-eyed peas I've ever tasted at mass.

It's not about how much of this or that you put into it or what technique you use.

Black cooking is more about flavor.

It's about spirit.

And I think it's less about like gourmet techniques that require a lot of fancy because we didn't have that.

Only thing we had was our feeling about the food and feeling about each other.

For me, I think the epiphany moment was my parents asked me, "what do you wanna be when you grow up" and I said, I wanna be a writer, I wanna be a teacher, I wanna be a chef and I wanna be a preacher.

For me, all those elements are conjoined.

This idea of feeding people as a spiritual exercise, this idea of feeding people as being an educator, this idea of feeding people as creating a text that's edible, all of that to me, it all makes sense.

It's all part of one holistic worldview.

The secret to the best cooking is trying to find things where everything complements each other.

It's about creating communalism among your ingredients and that's how you make the food taste good.

We call our food soul food, why?

It's named after something that transcends life and death.

It's not about our nation, it's about our spirit and that's what makes me so proud of it.

I wanted to write and one thing that's important to do is really do your own research but I think for African Americans, one of the struggles we have is that it's not easy for us to find out where we come from because when we say that our names were taken and our identities were switched around for other people's benefit, we are not joking.

That's how it happened.

We have to scale a lot of brick walls to get to where other people just hop on back.

For some people, they're satisfied knowing that their ancestors came from Germany.

For a lot of African Americans, they don't know which countries, plural, in West Africa their ancestors came from.

So in the cooking gene, I decided to do all of those pieces.

I wanted to know how did my ancestors who were enslaved, what kinda work did they do?

How did they process all these crops into consumables?

And to know that if it were not for certain choices and accents of history, you might be in their shoes and to have that sort of feeling of gratitude that you're not.

So how hard was it for these folks, our ancestors, our forebearers to deal with those situations like that and somehow make a way out of no way?

I never say the word slave.

I say slave is an identity, enslaved is a condition.

So we don't wanna put on our ancestors a label that they themselves would reject because it wasn't true.

Once you have that roadmap to where things start, you can kind of have a roadmap to where things are gonna go.

And to me, that's extremely powerful.

(calm music) - [Announcer] This has been Revolution 250 Stories From the First Shore.

To learn more about this and other events of the Revolutionary Age of America, visit whro.org/usa250.

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