Interview (Chef Pearson)

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The first interview is with Chef Pearson of Johnson & Wales, Charlotte. Based on his travels and experience, he was the perfect choice to discuss the African influence. With his knowledge of world cuisines, he offered a wealth of information on the subject. It is important to include this interview in it entirety because Chef Pearson offered a different approach to the idea of the African influence. His premise is that technique (the one pot cooking) their biggest influence.

Chef Pearson:
The African influence on American food is purely out of a bad situation. It comes out of slavery and the situation was that wealthy white people…well wealthy people in general have a tendency to not want to do dirty work. So anything that they didn’t want to do, they’ve always gone out and found a group of people that couldn’t defend themselves and weren’t educated enough to understand what was going on. Basically South Africa was already European occupied and they wanted to keep their Africans there to do their work. Primarily from North Africa and put them into jobs that nobody wanted to do especially dangerous, dirty work. Especially in the kitchen, they weren’t even connected to houses at the time. Then we said to them here’s some food and a pot and they had to cook or suffer the consequences. The thing about Africa, it’s not a lack of food, well there may be a lack of food in some areas, but it’s mostly a lack of water. The people were nomadic. They basically acted like a herd of animals; the animals would travel to find the water. That’s what the people did. They were large groups; large families traveled together…they all stuck together, aunts, uncles, grandparents… Being large groups they would travel with only with what they could carry. The basic style of cooking in Africa was one pot. In the United States we can take one chicken and cut it into eight pieces and serve four people, but in Africa you have to take one chicken and serve forty people. So they would cut it up into small pieces, they would braise and stew everything, so that whole one pot cooking is directly from Africa. So the biggest contribution that the Africans made was the one pot cooking. So the slaves were put into a position where they had to cook, so they fall back on what they did while they were in Africa, and that’s how they cook. Now, we take that and look at what their true contribution was and it wasn’t food, it was purely technique…of course there’re some things like okra, that is indigenous to Africa; the slaves brought that over in their pockets and planted it behind their quarters and it started growing and they began to incorporate it in their diet. They didn’t bring a whole lot of them in, they didn’t have much. It wasn’t that their food made their contribution so significant; it was the fact that they were cooking the food. We can look back and we can trace different things that have become very popular now and that are directly a part of Africa. There was a large slave population in the south. If you go to Charleston, the dish you’ll see in just about every restaurant is shrimp and grits. That is a dish that came from the Gullah community, but they didn’t eat shrimp. Shrimp was expensive then. They used flat fish that the white slave owners didn’t want to eat because they were too boney. And so they would process the grits and the slave owners got the fine grits and that’s what the wealthy people ate and the grits that came off the sides that were called stone ground or hominy grits is what the
African community got. So they go home and cook these grits and roll the fish in cornmeal and salt…and they would take the old tomatoes and smash them and make a tomato sauce. So the shrimp and grits evolved from the Gullah dish, but they didn’t want to fool with boney fish. The original jambalaya is jollof rice and it basically the same thing except in Africa they used some fish products because they had it…when they came to the United States, they had the tomatoes, the shrimp, okra and other items that became incorporated in the dish…still the one pot idea. It’s all about poverty and making it into something that people will always like to eat. I can go to region in the U.S. and find a soul food restaurant.

Basically the one pot cooking was Africa’s major contribution to American cuisine. African influence has been incorporated into the fabric of American cooking.