Recipes for Respect by Rafia Zafar;

Author:Rafia Zafar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Negro Cooks Up His Past

Arturo Schomburg’s Uncompleted Cookbook

Among the papers of the Puerto Rican–born Arturo (a.k.a. Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg, one of the twentieth century’s most important bibliophiles, rests an unpublished manuscript labeled “[cookbook].”1 Many scholars of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its founder, and even his descendants, have little idea that the noted archivist of the African diaspora showed a serious interest in food.2 Schomburg’s typescript, including a page in his own hand, proposes a historical Black gastronomy divided “into three parts—Morning, Noon and Night—with appropriate meal time victuals and between-time snacks.”3 His plan, to make visible the “negro genius” in gastronomy, was in keeping with his life’s work. The archetypical unsung individual who “adapted the English, French, Spanish and Colonial receipts taught him by his masters … to his own temperamental needs” would be celebrated along with “his own peculiar artistic powers” (1). So he would acknowledge the unsung talents of the many whose names went unrecorded.4 As he so famously wrote in The New Negro, “The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.”5 Schomburg’s projected gastronomy would script a master recipe for respect, a culinary narrative complementing the history and achievements of Black people.

That Schomburg’s groundbreaking compendium was never completed is something of a mystery. Textual evidence dates its composition around 1930, suggesting there were some years between its initial draft and his death in 1938. Its unfinished state perhaps attests to the vastness of the subject he contemplated coupled with the scant primary sources available. Menus, cookbooks, and hospitality guides were even more rare than the “books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings … [writings on] social service and reform … [and] efforts towards race emancipation, colonization, and race betterment” that made up nearly the entire original collection.6 If scholarship of the African diaspora was still in its early stages, even more nebulous would have been the study of Black domestic service, cookery, and foodways, a subject supported by rich anecdotal evidence but few documents.7 Whatever his initial intentions, what remains of Schomburg’s volume are fewer than two dozen pages of historical survey, a bit of personal memoir, an extensive list of recipe titles, a few handwritten notes, and a single recipe for okra gumbo taken from Lafcadio Hearn’s classic New Orleans cookbook.8

Of the extant twenty-two manuscript pages, nine are arranged in menu format, broken down into daily mealtimes with subheads for categories such as breads and meats. The introductory pages indicate he planned to write biographies of prominent and little-known cooks alike and reveal the history of cooking in the United States as shaped by those of African descent. The handwritten notes (figure 7.1) that follow the typed proposal and precede the La Cuisine Creole recipe for “Gumbo of Okra or Filee” illustrate the range of Schomburg’s inquiry. Schomburg’s tome could have been an omnibus that stretched over centuries, American states, and extranational locales. The enormous scope was in keeping

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