108 Yentsch, Anne. E. 2007. Excavating the South’s African American Food History. In Anne Bower (ed.), African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 59-99. Excavating the South’s African American Food History 1 Anne Yentsch Introduction Nostalgia governs African Americans’ recollections of family meals and the food their mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles cooked; their memories with accompany recipes are a focus of recent cookbooks. (e.g., Maya Angelou’s “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes” issued by Random House in 2004). Andrew Warnes shows us, in “Hunger Overcome,” how black writers take the maneuvers African Americans used to obtain food and weld them into inextricable aspects of their characters’ lives; in the columns (How to Eat to Live) of Muhammad Speaks, Elijah Muhammad rejected these same foods on religious grounds, urging others to do so too. 2 These informal reminiscences, literary memories, and religious strictures speak to who black people are. They tell of social and cultural identities centered on special foods, dishes steeped today in black mythology. Yet, despite this the complex realities of African American food history are difficult to document. Most African American cookbooks present themselves as drawing on long- standing southern traditions; they provide recipes for feather light biscuits, chicken and dumplings, boiled crab or fried shrimp, pork flavored beans, okra gumbo, pecan pies, sweet tea, coconut and caramel cakes, banana pudding, peach and blackberry cobblers, and, of course, divinity fudge. Rice in various guises, sweet potatoes and corn cooked