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The African influence in both countries' cuisine is well documented, but a comparison of two specific dishes, both prominent in popular culture, reveals how African-derived and -produced foods have been used to construct regional, ethnic, and national identities within these two societies of the Americas.1 Around the globe, many communities boast a proprietary rice-and-bean combination, what anthropologists Richard Wilk and Livia Barbosa have called \"a unique dish in a hundred places.\" [...]Iberian cuisine is marked by its incorporation of offal and viscera, and the use of those parts in feijoada would have been an option only for the elite. According to culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, Senegal's thiebou niebe is a black-eyed pea stew served with rice from which Hoppin' John derived. In South Carolina as in Brazil, enslaved communities grew dietary staples such as okra, greens, rice, and black-eyed peas in their own provision gardens, using food to exercise choice and preserve culture, memory, and identity under brutal circumstances.7 Peas journeyed from Central Africa to the West Indies in the early 1700s, then to the Carolinas on slave ships as sustenance for the enslaved.

This Bike is a Pipe Bomb rattled the basement windows of our rental house. High frequencies slipped through masonry cracks into the Athens, Georgia night, as amps fritzed from shorting wires. Guitar strings curled from frontman Rymodee's tuning pegs like rooster sickle feathers. He stood stiff when he sang, a slight figure whose mutton chops grew coiled as a scouring pad. He often hid his bright, kind eyes beneath a worn fedora tilted low, and wrapped his rawboned body in a denim vest. A shoddy microphone pressed to his lips, his voice reverberated against the plumbing and floor framing that crisscrossed overhead. \"This is what I want, black kids and white kids, sharing all the songs / that their grandmama taught them,\" he screamed in a manner that honored both his love of English anarchists and his Tuscaloosa bloodline. This 2002 plea from the Pensacola, Florida trio found power in a room full of sweaty young punks. Alone, we were weirdos; together, we demanded sing-a-longs. A few crumpled dollar bills bought anyone entry. The crowd squeezed the band vise-tight, bumping bassist Terry Johnson and Rymodee into Ted Helmick's drumset, which fell away from his foot mid-thump, cymbals spilling onto the dirt floor. Precision didn't matter. We looked forward to the broken strings and miscues that paused songs, when Rymodee's nervous chatter and Terry's ribbing found voice. Most of us loved their music, a sound not quite punk or country (they couldn't pull off either with grace). The Pipe Bomb were the proud and discordant offspring of twang and protest, and the songs raced from choruses to outros with messages of social justice and folk teachings. Even metalheads flocked to their awkward hoedowns, seeking a safe space where beer spilled on clothes was quickly forgiven as the result of a good time. In the basement, nothing demarcated fan from musician. That continued when Pipe Bomb shows ended. Amps put away, a second performance began. Crates of cookware emerged from deep within the band's Jenga-stacked van. Rymodee unloaded his suitcase of spices. The party would move to the kitchen.

Sweet potatoes flourish in sandy soil. Strawberries announce the advent of spring. Figs sweeten the landscape in August. Canada geese flock to harvest cornfields in winter. Oysters, drum fish, mullet, clams, and spot add a signature dimension to coastal tables, but so, too, do local preparations for stewed pork and pumpkin, black duck and dumplings, peas and doughboys, and sweetened cornbread. The foodways of the coastal South offer a lot more than seafood. Corn pone, as regional fare and culinary concept, covers a good deal of territory, but Hannah Mary’s pone offers a glimpse into a dish well seasoned with Eastern Shore associations that embrace relations between the well-to-do and the poor, black and white, and memory and practice. Here, the author discusses the dish's preparation and the history of the recipe.

For those who might not know, the difference between field corn and sweet corn is significant. Noah Hultgren of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association (admittedly far removed from the South) gets to the point.

In 2000, to usher in the new millennium, my husband and I bought a crack house in Asheville's East End. This was not a glib assessment of one of those abandoned houses you see with overgrown bushes in the front yard, a sad, sagging porch, and a rumored history of violence, although the house had all those things. We found little crack baggies lying on the floor next to a stained mattress in the front bedroom. There was a hole in the kitchen floor where you could peer into the dirt crawlspace below, and the back porch was filled with waterlogged furniture, discarded 40-ounce bottles, and lots and lots of trash. It needed a complete rehab. But it was cheap, it had good bones, and we were young and strong. The house ended up being a treasure at the price we paid, and we found other treasures there, too. What we didn't find, however, was food.The house we bought, renovated, and made our home is a 1910 two-bedroom, one-bath, 1,100-square-foot cottage on Ridge Street in the East End neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina, and is fairly typical of the homes you'll find there. East End is a traditionally African-American neighborhood encompassing about 250 acres, nestled between downtown Asheville and Beaucatcher Mountain.

What could be more southern than barbecue? Even when entrepreneurs have taken the dish to other parts of the world, the names of their establishments pay tribute to the origins of their product, either explicitly (Memphis Championship Barbecue in Las Vegas, Memphis Minnie's in San Francisco, the Carolina Country Kitchen in Brooklyn, the Arkansas Cafe in London) or at least by implication (Jake and Earl's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Daisy May's in Manhattan, Dixie's in Bellevue, Washington). Rivaled only by grits as the national dish of the South, barbecue would appear to be as southern, as indigenous, as it comes.

Often, these rediscovered foods come from \"Native\" varieties that seed savers, naturalists, nutritionists, and Indians have propped up, from animals that regulators, commercial producers, and advocates have brought back from the brink of extinction, and from habitats redeemed from under middens of waste and neglect.1 Some Native communities, in revitalizing their own cultural histories and economies, have begun again to raise, catch, and market crops and critters long associated with them, but just as long ago replaced. Meat, fish, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts made for a better, richer, more abundant, and more nutritious diet than available to most of the Anglo-Europeans that journeyed to the South and a more dependable, consistent, diverse diet than most Indians elsewhere (except those in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest).3 From their indigenous relatives in Mexico, Southeastern (and Southwestern) Indians had centuries ago learned the knowledge and skills associated with cultivating corn, which they shared with receptive settlers.4 Essential Native practices included combining corn and beans to create protein and amino acid-rich meals; consuming hominy, cornbreads, soups, drinks, and mushes (grits, tamales) made from limed corn (nixtamalization); using nitrogen-enriching leguminous ash in various corn dishes; interplanting corn with nitrogen-replacing or nitrogen- fixing varieties (e.g. , legumes); and rotating nutritionally exhausted croplands with alternate crops.'

There is a warm feeling of peace that comes with driving by field after field of great, round newly harvested bales of hay-the sun shining golden, like calendar art, on a farm culture that continues despite the bitter war news or the latest Washington scandal heard on the radio. There's irony in Mary's cotton field pictures hanging in her bright, spacious modern home, yet I couldn't help but think of nearby Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, and Mary's role in cotton's bitter history, its roots in slavery and then sharecropping. Information on manure cures can be found in Wayland D. Hand, ed., American Folk Medicine (University of California Press, 1980), 211.