Feijoada and Hoppin’ John: Dishing the African Diaspora in Brazil and the United States

• Published in: Southern cultures 2019-12, Vol.25 (4), p.158-175
• Main Author: Terenzio, Olivia Ware
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 16th century; African diaspora; Beans; BEYOND GRITS AND GRAVY; Brock, Sean; Cultural identity; Diaspora; Diasporas; Edge, John T; Harris, Jessica B; Historians; Legumes; National identity; Periodicals; Plantations; Rice; Twitty, Michael
• ISSN: 1068-8218; 1534-1488; 1534-1488
• DOI: 10.1353/scu.2019.0051

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.