Black history on a plate Cornbread dressing sparks longing for family, from America to West Africa
Cornbread dressing
The first time I ate stuffing was in second grade, I think. I’d been selected for a special Thanksgiving lunch, probably chosen based on good behavior or grades. I got to leave the long, low lunch bench with room for what seemed like 20 other kids, and graduated to a fancy dining table draped in festive linens at the front of the cafeteria with the other guests of honor. The best part? Our lunch was supposed to be an upgrade, too. No questionable grayishbrown turkey glop for me!
I felt proud and a bit embarrassed by the attention, but was excited by the prospect of a Thanksgiving meal similar to the ones we had at home. Forget the turkey — my ideal meal was all about the macaroni and cheese and dressing with cranberry sauce on the side.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I was served what appeared to be Stove Top stuffing. “Stove Top?” I thought in horror. This is
what we have at home. The name makes clear it’s not even baked in the oven, but cooked on the stove in some sort of instant, Thanksgiving-light excuse for the real holiday meal. My 7-year-old palate was offended.
Today I know my true problem wasn’t with the food itself, but with what it represented. Thanksgiving — including the meal and time spent with relatives seen most often at other holiday gatherings — has always represented family and feelings of warmth and closeness. Arguments and alliances would be set aside for a night filled with laughs, hugs and the voices of my favorite people. My mother would be in a good mood and even the contentious aunties and uncles would be on their best behavior (until the liquor or fatigue from wearing a mask all night kicked in, anyway). Stove Top stuffing wasn’t like the cornbread dressing my mother made, so that Thanksgiving lunch couldn’t be authentic. It was an impostor, as fake as some of the smiles around our Thanksgiving dinner table at home.
Plus, it seemed all my white friends — like a few sitting at the fancy school lunch table with me — had never heard of dressing. “You mean stuffing?” they’d ask. No, actually. I don’t.
“Cornbread dressing is Southern; it is also African,” author Toni Tipton-Martin writes in “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking.” “It descends from a memory dish some of the enslaved called kush (also spelled cush), made from cooked cornmeal mush or crumbled cornbread. The one-pot meal reminded West African captives of a couscous-like dish of steamed or boiled grains of millet or sorghum.”
Tipton-Martin, who won a James Beard Award for “The
Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks,” cites “The Cooking Gene” by culinary historian Michael Twitty, another black Beard Award winner. I had the pleasure of meeting Twitty at the 2019 James Beard Foundation Awards, somewhere I never imagined I’d be, during a period when I’ve been looking backward and asking questions about my own family ties and ancestry.
Many chefs pay homage to family and cooks of the past by showcasing their cultural and ethnic identities through food. That isn’t a new concept. But public and prestigious recognition for their contributions and sacrifices, presented with more accurate historical context — however painful or reprehensible — is a more recent movement. Several James Beard Award winners spoke of inclusion and diversity, of heritage and gratitude, that May evening. When Kwame Onwuachi accepted his first Beard for “Notes From a Young Black Chef: A Memoir,” his direct, soulful words set the tone for the rest of the night.
“Fifty-four years ago is when the last restaurant was integrated and Jim Crow was lifted, and here I am: my ancestors’ wildest dream,” he said as I cried silently, beaming.
That was only the first of many proud moments. I fell in love with Mashama Bailey when I watched Season 6, Episode 1 of “Chef ’s Table.” Her Savannah, Georgia, restaurant, The Grey, is a restored Greyhound bus station, segregated under Jim Crow when it was open from 1938 to 1964. The space for server stations and restrooms used to be the “colored” waiting room, according to The Washington Post. Had she been born earlier in time, Bailey legally wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in the same section as the white patrons she’d come to host in her restaurant.
I haven’t watched “Chef ’s Table” since I finished her episode because I don’t know what could top it in terms of deep personal resonance.
“We should all be very proud of ourselves. We are moving this country forward in the right direction,” she said when she accepted her Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast. My heart could’ve burst.
Later that night at the Beards Big Star after-party, my dear friend and former Tribune Food & Dining deputy editor Joseph Hernandez asked if I wanted to meet Bailey. I know we’re not supposed to fangirl over chefs — perceived conflict of interest and all — but this night was monumental and we all knew it. Twitty walked me over to Bailey and handled the introduction. I congratulated her, telling her how much her work meant to me and to the culture. Her parents were also at the table, ecstatic and so damn proud it made my heart ache.
That night I witnessed the James Beard Foundation honor Bailey and Onwuachi, who honor our ancestors with every plate. The way my mom honors our ancestors every time she makes cornbread dressing, even if she’s never thought of it that way. The way Louisiana Cajuns would honor the Senegambian people by preparing and personalizing kush, Tipton-Martin writes.
“Twitty unearthed memories of both dishes (cornbread dressing and kush) in the Slave Narratives, a Federal Writers’ Project, that between 1936 and 1938 collected interviews with the formerly enslaved,” Tipton-Martin writes. “Anna Wright of North Carolina remembered: ‘Kush was cornbread, cooked on de big griddle mashed up with raw onions an’ ham gravy cornbread poured over hit … de old southern way of makin’ baked chicken dressin.’ ”
My mom’s dressing is “baked chicken dressin’,” too. Nenda, as my sisters and I call her, roasts a chicken on Thanksgiving instead of a turkey. She then uses those pan drippings in her cornbread dressing, a side dish that makes Thanksgiving a special holiday for me. She adapted a recipe from Chicago personal chef Sandra Clayborne, who, like Nenda, grew up eating her mother’s cornbread dressing on the South Side.
“I go to the recipe myself every year,” Clayborne told me over the phone.
After her mother died, Clayborne and her sister made multiple batches of dressing until it matched their mother’s recipe, which hadn’t been recorded with exact measurements. Clayborne’s mother migrated from Mississippi, just like my late grandmother, Daisy Mae Crayton, born in 1934. My grandmother was born 30 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 abolished Jim Crow laws, the “formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South,” which is how a Public Broadcasting Service article about its “Freedom
Riders” documentary describes the laws.
Cornbread dressing is so much more than a Thanksgiving side dish. Food is always so much more than physical nourishment. It’s my connection to family, known and unfamiliar, from Chicago to Mississippi to West Africa. 2019, more than any other year, has revolved around trying to find kinship, seeking more information about my past, my roots and my ancestors. Seeking the knowledge that, for centuries, has been denied to me and people who look like me. I may spend the rest of my life looking for answers about my family and, in turn, myself. But in the meantime, I’ll always have my mama’s dressing.