Food in Time and Place by Albala Ken Freedman Paul Chaplin Joyce E

Author:Albala, Ken, Freedman, Paul, Chaplin, Joyce E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520277458
Publisher: University of California Press

ENYUCADO9

3 cups shredded cassava

1 ½ cups fresh grated Colombian queso

1 cup sugar

1 tablespoon butter, melted

¾ cup grated coconut

1 cup coconut milk

1 teaspoon ground star anise

Preheat the oven to 400. Put all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Pour the mixture into a buttered baking dish and bake for about 45 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool, cut into squares, and serve.

INTO THE CARIBBEAN

When the Spanish started establishing settlements in the Caribbean, they imported large numbers of domesticated pigs that quickly became the center of the region’s culinary culture.

Anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz is the most notable among those early thought leaders in food studies whose work focused on the history and meaning of food in the Caribbean. He writes that Caribbean slavery lasted from 1503 until 1886, and that during that time conservative estimates suggest that some “nine and one-half million enslaved Africans reached the Americas. Nearly a third—about 2.6 million—reached the Caribbean islands”; between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, merchants imported some 700,000 enslaved Africans to the island of Cuba alone.10 Mintz documents that these enslaved Africans in the Caribbean ate a diet rich in cassava, maize, and peanuts, foods that originated in the Americas, traveled to Africa, became incorporated into aspects of African cuisine, and then returned to the New World via Africanized makeovers.11

European foodways had an influence on Africans in the Americas, particularly in terms of Dutch pancakes, waffles, and cookies; British puddings, pies, and cakes; and Italian pasta for macaroni and cheese. But Native American foodways had a far more significant impact. The earliest Africans learned from indigenous people about foraging, food preparation, and consumption. Native Americans taught Africans different ways to farm, including the gastronomical trinity of beans, corn, and squash. With regional differences, these three crops became staples throughout the African diaspora in the Americas.

Likewise, Africans had a tremendous impact on the regions where they disembarked. Cooks in the Hispanic Caribbean created mofongo from fried green plantains pounded like foo foo (a starch mashed into a small edible mass) with garlic, olive oil, broth, and fried pork. Africans cultivated subsistence gardens similar to those described in travel accounts from West and Central Africa. The gardens were necessary because plantation managers in the Caribbean typically distributed niggardly allotments of rations. Former slave Esteban Montejo (1860–1973) spent his formative years living and working on sugar plantations in Villa Clara, a province in the center of Cuba bordering with the providences of Matanzas, Sancti Spiritus, and Cienfuegos. He describes a slave society in Villa Clara filled with Musungo Congos, Mandingos, Gangas, Lucumis, and Carabalis Africans. Montejo recalled small gardens where “sweet potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like limas, limes, yucca [cassava], and peanuts” saved many slaves from starvation. The majority of plants that Montejo described above were cooked by Africans in West and Central Africa.12

Like Haiti for the French, Jamaica and Barbados were exploitation colonies in which the British remained so focused on returning to England wealthy that they made no attempt to populate the island with Europeans settlers or recreate European culture.

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