Our dessert recipes are essential to our culture, as they’ve likely been passed down through generations and hold a special place in our hearts. Black desserts such as pound cake, upside down 7-up cake, red velvet cake, sweet potato pie, and peach cobbler are significant because there’s a story behind their recipes.
On July 7th, several Black women prominent bakers and chefs discussed the cultural significance of each sweet treat and the role of social media in amplifying their rich history in our communities, as well as exploring the evolution of Black desserts from slavery to now. The ladies delved into how they came to love and revere desserts and how they could put their twist on age-old traditions and their process.
Delk shared that her business was started because of her grandmother’s delicious dessert recipes. But then, I wanted to take her recipes and put my spin on them. I wanted the desserts to have a bit of my personality. I wanted it to be fresh and unique. Chef Rozi remembers her early moments with desserts and being with the elders in her family. “Like everybody else, it always comes from a grandmother and a mother.
Sometimes, getting recipes from our elders is hard, as they often don’t use measuring utensils! That was Chef Tregaye’s experience. Of course, she did not necessarily know the ingredients and the ratios. I feel like it’s my living family recipe book. Delk believes remixing recipes is a way to keep the tradition of Black desserts alive. “Creating remixes of the original dessert recipe is how we keep them alive I think that’s our moment to teach our kids Black dessert history.
I always say bakers are the sweetest folks on earth. As I’ve traced my own family history, I’ve connected with other Black bakers who are discovering their personal legacy stories. All our stories have a direct connection to our ancestors, and they continue to live on through us - and our baking.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
In honor of Black History Month, I’m excited to introduce you to three of these bakers and share their delicious recipes. I’m excited to introduce you to a very talented baker: Joanne Canady-Brown, owner of The Gingered Peach in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Joanne is the owner of New Jersey's The Gingered Peach, serving handcrafted baked goods with soul. Dawn Konofaos, the proprietor of Alevri & Co., is a milliner turned fine sweets artist. Dawn is a fine sweets artist and the founder of Alévri & Co.
My mother left Alabama after World War II, joining the Great Migration alongside millions of pioneering Black folks who left the South for cities in the North and West in pursuit of better opportunities. She brought her culture and a box of treasured family recipes with her on the train she took to Los Angeles, including the one for this cake. Moist cardamom-flecked cake layers are stacked with a creamy coconut filling and topped with a coconut milk buttercream and flaky coconut.
I’m thrilled to share a recipe for Root Beer Cake from my dear friend Carla Hall. In the 1960’s, Coca-Cola found its way into a cake, and it became one of the most popular cakes on the Southern community table. This moist cake is a spin on Carla’s grandmother’s classic Coca-Cola Cake, using root beer, fresh ginger, smoked cinnamon, and star anise to spice it up. Dawn’s use of botanicals is just one of the traits that connect her to the legacy of our ancestors.
One of those pies is her Purple Sweet Potato Pie, a tribute to her dad. For millions of African Americans like me, Thanksgiving Day means sweet potatoes, not pumpkins, and we love sweet potatoes so much that we won’t settle for having a sole side dish of candied sweet potatoes (we call them “yams,” but that’s another story) or sweet potato casserole. No, we have to double down on this tasty tuber and serve up sweet potato pie for dessert, too. Sure, we eat this soul food classic year-round, but this is the week that the sweet potato pie really shines.
As much as sweet potato pie is beloved within the black community and in the South, it doesn’t seem to get much love elsewhere. Our national pie divide is deepest when people choose between pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving Day. And that got me wondering: How did sweet potato pie become a soul-food favorite over its chief Thanksgiving rival?
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
When tracing the history of African American cuisine, it’s best to take stock of what was inherited from West Africa, our ancestral homeland. I’d thought and hoped that sweet potato pie had West African roots, but the trail begins in Peru, where sweet potatoes originated. As early as the 16th century, Spanish traders shipped sweet potatoes from the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean on two different routes, one headed to West Africa and the other to Western Europe.
West African cooks first experimented with sweet potatoes as a possible substitute for the other root crops (cassava, plantain and yams) that they used to make a typical meal of some sort of starch served with a savory sauce, soup or stew typically made with fish and vegetables. One particular specialty was fufu, in which a root is boiled, mashed or pounded and shaped into balls.
But West African cooks probably never tried, for two reasons. First, the sweet spud was a complete dud to the West African palate. They didn’t like the sweet potato’s taste, disparagingly called it “the white man’s yam” and focused primarily on eating the leaves. Second, even if they liked sweet potatoes, West Africans would not naturally think of cooking them for “dessert.” That was something Europeans did.
Unlike West Africans, Western Europeans gave the sweet potato a sensational reception. It quickly earned a reputation as an aphrodisiac, got a shout-out in Shakespeare’s play “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (“Let the sky rain potatoes”) and started showing up on England’s royal tables. Henry VIII’s voracious appetite for sweet potato tarts, the pie’s close cousin, immediately conferred an elite status on sweet potatoes as a dessert. Imagine if someone had painted the king eating a sweet potato tart with an ecstatic expression on his face.
History is silent on whether or not Henry VIII specifically requested sweet potatoes to fill that pastry; but if he did, his royal cook probably took the same approach as his West African counterparts by substituting sweet potatoes, the new root, into old recipes that utilized other roots. The only difference was that Western Europe had a dessert tradition, and roots and other vegetables were just as likely as fruit to be featured in savory and sweet pie recipes.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
There’s no existing recipe for Henry VIII’s sweet potato tart, but a high-profile English cookbook published a couple of centuries after his reign suggests an answer. Hannah Glasse’s “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,” published in 1747, was wildly popular with housewives in Britain and its colonies. In it, root vegetable “puddings” were made by boiling and grating, mashing or slicing the vegetable, then adding butter, eggs, milk and sugar before baking it in an open-faced pie shell.
Wealthy American colonial kitchens eagerly adopted the latest culinary trends out of England, and the Big Houses at plantations in the antebellum South were no exception. Flip through the pages of the iconic southern cookbooks used in those elite kitchens - “The Virginia Housewife,” “The Kentucky Housewife” and “The Carolina Housewife” - and you will find strikingly similar recipes for pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie and squash pie existing side by side in the dessert sections. Southern cooks, black and white, turned more often to recipes for sweet potatoes because, in the South, they were easier to grow than edible pumpkins. Using the same logic, Northern cooks preferred the easy-growing gourds for their pies.
A sweet potato field
Despite what was happening in the Big House, sweet potato pie took longer to catch on in the plantation’s slave cabins. In the antebellum South, dessert was not a regular part of a meal pattern that primarily consisted of boiled vegetables, corn bread and buttermilk. During the week, if there was a dessert, it would be a piece of corn bread with some molasses poured on top or some fruit. In addition, slave cabins rarely had the cooking equipment or appliances necessary to adequately bake a pie. The first sweet potato dessert in the slave cabin was a whole sweet potato roasted in the embers of a dying fire.
Because of the glassy look that the outside would get from the caramelization of the vegetable’s natural sugars, they were described as being “candied.” Only with the advent of improved and affordable stoves and increased access to processed ingredients such as white flour and sugar could African American cooks transition from roasting sweet potatoes to making cakes, cobblers and pies.
After Emancipation, the ethnic and regional divides between pumpkin and sweet potato pies were laid bare in the national and regional media. Pumpkin pies were the pride of the North (especially New England), becoming closely associated with the Thanksgiving holiday by the late 1800s, and sweet potato pies were the South’s preferred pie, as well as an African American favorite. I know that despite the high-class pedigree of sweet potato pie, some of you will adhere to a philosophy of pumpkin pie supremacy. I grieve for you, but not for long.
The overarching theme of the night’s awards, presented in Chicago on May 7, seemed to be that these chefs in contention for the highest awards in American gastronomy were being recognized for their authenticity and clarity of voice. Perhaps the most stunning of these awards came in the form of powerhouse chef Dolester Miles and her win for Outstanding Pastry Chef, for her work at the Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Alabama.
Miss Dol took to the stage with a little shock and a beautifully simple speech that spoke to the humility with which she accepted the award. Later Kim Severson, writing for The New York Times, penned a gorgeous profile documenting the sort of guileless Southern baking that won Miles this highest honor.
In the ways that count most, I’m essentially a Northern chef two generations removed from the South. My grandparents were transplants to the North-moving from Latta, South Carolina, to Newark, New Jersey, in the late ’50s-so my food roots are very much a Southern story by proxy. As I navigate my life as a chef, I’m confronted with the task of trying to find evidence through history for how black chefs have gifted this country with the recipes and techniques that make up the canon of American cookery, and in this search I find that it’s the baking that gives us the clearest proof.
But if I were to understand the personal narrative of Southern baking, I needed to hear from marrow-deep Southern chefs to find out if my suspicions about the essential nature of these traditions held true. Enrika Williams, who is a gloriously Afro’d and infectiously effervescent chef from Jackson, Mississippi, has used her career to indulge a kind of food-driven wanderlust, traveling the country and working with chefs such as Richard Blais, Carla Hall, Sean Brock, and Emeril Lagasse.
Enrika is telling us about her wildly successful dinner series that recently wrapped up and an upcoming move to New Orleans. We’re discussing food, politics, and career, and I bring the conversation around to chef Miles. Adrian reminded me of the church tradition of baking cookbooks filled with heirloom recipes that the women of nearly every Baptist church would circulate. These books were sold as part of fund-raising efforts for the churches, but they also became this wonderful independent publishing network that passed down hundreds of years of pastry traditions.
Enrika talks about the pride you would be honored with if an auntie or, more reverently, your grandmother, requested you bake a cobbler or pound cake. My friends gave me personal narrative, and then I looked to history. Consider James Hemings at the birth of the nation. Our first classically trained gourmand, Hemings was taken to France by Thomas Jefferson and considered free the moment his feet touched the country. Cooking instantly elevated his station.
In France, Hemings was trained in the kitchens of Versailles and all the most chic and relevant kitchens in Europe. He then came back to the United States and started what was essentially the first cooking school at Monticello-an institution that aims to upgrade the gastronomic reach of America by infusing technique into what up to that point had been simple colonial cooking. Hemings brought back to Virginia a sophistication with a wide repertoire of dishes, including everything from macaroni and cheese to French fries.
But it’s Hemings’s baking that turned out to be superlative. He gave us ice cream and custards and the earliest cakes. Hemings and his technique-driven cooking lead us to the possibility of someone like Anne Northup a generation and a half later. Chef Northup was notably the wife of Solomon Northup, a captured free man and the author of the best-selling work 12 Years a Slave, which chronicled his experiences as a slave. But she was more notable in her own right as an acclaimed pastry chef in the mid-19th century.
Historian and colonial cookery expert Tonya Hopkins is maybe our greatest living expert on the life of Anne Northup. In her presentation, Hopkins pointed out that Northup was so sought after as a confectioner that she would travel the country and work as a chef in residence for wealthy families and hotels all over the country. Based in Saratoga, New York, the Northup family lived well among a small settlement of freed black people, and it was Anne’s culinary abilities that afforded her an elevated social status and her family a degree of comfort and resources.
Northup was certainly an outlier in some ways, given her husband’s extraordinary circumstance and because of her culinary excellence and freed status, but the trend in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries was to rely on the expertise of the chefs and cooks of the moment to bring style and sophistication to this newly formed nation. Restaurant culture is a relatively modern affectation, so it was the hotel or the private home where gastronomy was being created, and your status and wealth was contingent on how well you dined and entertained.
The chef becomes critical to this narrative, and it’s largely the enslaved, then the freed, black chef that dominated these service jobs well into the mid 1950s, which provides us another puzzle piece that evidences our critical role in the construction of American gastronomy. Credit and accuracy are important to me because I think that a short memory steals from us the gift of hard-fought lessons.
This got me thinking about how we contextualize the soul food narrative as the totality of the black culinary legacy of this country and misunderstand that these threadbare gems are actually a snapshot of a wildly transformational era in American foodways. Soul food is the immigrant cuisine of the American South. As American restaurant culture was being birthed, black people were largely segregated or excluded, so the soul food restaurant became our culinary home, and again baking is where we see the strongest and most potent stories.
Southern baking is one of the great saviors of the civil rights era. From back-door restaurants like Mrs. Georgia Gilmore’s Club From Nowhere to the late iconic matriarch of Mama Dip’s restaurant, the late Mrs. Mildred “Mama Dip” Cotton Council, our baking traditions gave us celebration and connectivity. These cakes and pies were more than sweets; they were nostalgia and comfort and respite from the realities of the day.
The fact that you could bake dozens of pies or pound cakes for very little money and earn a living, fund a resistance movement, was a wonderful byproduct. One of my favorite books on Southern baking is Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, From Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan, by a fascinating cookbook author as well as maybe the nicest person on earth, Nancie McDermott.
Taking a break from the canon of Thai cooking that had been the hallmark of her extraordinary writing, McDermott decided to use the lens of Southern pies to write this beautiful love letter to Southern baking. She’d lived all over the world and explored all manner of cultures in her work, but like most great artists do, she went back to her roots, in Piedmont, North Carolina, and formulated this simple, though technically beautiful, study in what makes a perfectly crafted pie so powerful.
She followed up her Southern-pies book with Southern Cakes: Sweet and Irresistible Recipes for Everyday Celebrations, and what I took away from her stories and recipes was the power of remembrance and the technical authority that pastry work seems to have. I think I may have learned the most valuable lessons of my culinary life trying to channel the mystical power of a poured caramel cake icing-more than in the combined efforts of my very expensive four years of culinary school-and I wonder if I should be outraged or humbled.
Perfect Southern caramel cake is quite exquisite, yet deceptively simple. The care that must be paid in order to bake a perfect cake that is structurally sound enough to stand up to the hot icing yet tender enough to melt on the tongue with the same finesse as the icing is a revelation when it’s achieved. The icing, a beautiful and rich brown sugar fudge, takes patience, science, attention, and timing; it must be poured onto the perfectly cooled cake layers so that the glorious multiple layers are staked and set without marring the immaculately smooth finished texture.
This cake has been baked for almost 100 years, and the process has been essentially the same the whole time. There is something wonderful about simple ingredients that turn into something special with a little care and a few notes from the ancestors. I can become Anne Northup and Georgia Gilmore and Edna Lewis with a few hours’ work and a little reverence. I think it would be easy to misunderstand the magical sleight of hand Miss Dol pulls off at Highlands Bar and Grill as simple intuition and muscle memory.
It would also be a misreading of history because it would discount the lives lost and the dignity found in the sifted flour and soft butter that has sustained life and a miraculous culinary legacy for hundreds of years. Miss Dol and all the other black chefs awarded this year for unqualified excellence was a Wakanda-style wink and nod to other black chefs.
From steaming plates of savory red beans and rice to cake stands overflowing with decadent sweets, foods shape our culinary world and are woven into our culture, traditions, and histories. In the United States, generations of African Americans have established and maintained Foodways rooted in the Black community. However, while these recipes may grace our dinner tables, their origins are often underrepresented or forgotten.
Journey through this article to uncover the beginnings of African American cuisine by exploring three cherished foods within the Black community. Our story begins in Africa, where thriving fields, vines, and pods overflow with African rice, okra, watermelon, yams, African eggplant, and cowpeas. For centuries, these crops formed the foundation of African cuisine, cultivated by farmers who adapted to harsh growing conditions, chefs who reimagined spice combinations, and families who passed down their knowledge through generations.
The year 1619 is often marked as the beginning of American slavery. However, almost 200 years earlier, Portugal established the European transatlantic slave trade. This buying and selling of African men, women, and children severed a natural relationship between the land and its people. Calas (ka-la) are a delectable example of fare that survives today and can be traced back to Africa. These rice fritters are fried until golden brown and dusted with powdered sugar.
When African people were taken from their homelands, their knowledge of rice cultivation went with them. What made calas’ origin unique was their connection to the Code Noir. Created and implemented in French colonial Louisiana, the Code Noir outlined guidelines for the treatment of enslaved and free people of African descent. Although the Code Noir was officially abolished by 1848, its influence continued to heavily regulate the lives of enslaved people.
One article of the code-integral to our fritter story-prohibited enslavers from requiring enslaved people to work on Sundays and holidays. Typically depicted wearing tignons, flowing dresses, and white aprons, cala women were seen and heard throughout the French Quarter. With coal-heated braziers and baskets balanced atop their heads, each rice fritter they sold carried the legacy of West African food culture.
Calas Fritters
Enslaved African Americans continued to express agency through food outside of the Creole state. One instance of this happened in the household of President Thomas Jefferson. An ardent Francophile, Jefferson deeply admired French architecture, traditions, and clothing. And French cuisine particularly captivated him while he served as the American minister to the French court. However, French chefs’ culinary artistry came at a high price.
Born in 1765 to his enslaver, John Wayles, and his enslaved mother, Elizabeth Hemings, James Hemings remained relatively unknown until 1773, when Wayles died. During his adolescence at Monticello, Hemings and his brother Robert served as valets to Jefferson as the wartime governor of Virginia. In 1784, Hemings received his first exposure to French cuisine when he accompanied Jefferson and his daughter Martha to Paris.
By 1787, Hemings had returned to the United States. He was still enslaved by Jefferson, who tasked him with serving French recipes at Monticello, New York, Philadelphia, and the White House. Although James Hemings didn’t invent the mac and cheese recipe found at modern social gatherings, he revolutionized America’s association with the dish and used earnings from his culinary skills to buy his freedom in 1796. After he died, Hemings’ legacy continued to be served on dinner tables across the country.
On June 19, 1865, the news of emancipation finally reached those enslaved in Galveston, Texas, when Union General Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3, declaring all enslaved individuals free. Although many enslaved African Americans celebrated two years earlier when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation-a decree that declared freedom for enslaved people in Confederate states-Texas, the westernmost Confederate-aligned state, continued to practice slavery.
When Union troops arrived and enforced emancipation, the formerly enslaved celebrated. Juneteenth celebrations often included traditional foods, which were crucial in maintaining cultural heritage and fostering community bonds among African Americans. One such dish with origins in Black empowerment is the humble bean pie.
