High on the Hog

4 ideas

1. James Hemings, Jefferson's French-trained enslaved chef

   Thomas Jefferson took James Hemings, an enslaved man he held, to Paris in 1784 to train in French cuisine, and Hemings became chef de cuisine at Jefferson's residence there. Back in America, Hemings secured a written promise of freedom on the condition that he first teach his brother Peter the French techniques; he was freed in 1796 and died in 1801. The case shows the refined 'American' table of a founding elite was cooked, and often shaped, by enslaved Black chefs whose skill was simultaneously valued and owned.

2. Enslaved Africans supplied skills, not just labor

   Enslavers in South Carolina and Georgia specifically sought Africans from the West African rice coast because they already knew how to grow, irrigate, hull and cook rice. This knowledge built the Lowcountry rice economy and its cuisine. Crops like okra, black-eyed peas, sesame (benne) and yams crossed the Atlantic, often as slave-ship provisions, and took root with the cooks who knew how to use them.

3. Reading cuisine through who got which cut

   The phrase 'high on the hog' records a hierarchy. The choice upper cuts went to the enslavers, while the enslaved got what was left: feet, chitterlings, jowls, greens and potlikker. Seeing food this way turns a dish into evidence of power relations, and it reframes African-American cooking as a craft of making abundance and flavor out of what was deliberately withheld.

4. Soul food as a named identity

   The dishes of the rural South were carried north and west by the Great Migration, cooked in urban kitchens and sold in restaurants. In the 1960s they were renamed 'soul food' as an assertion of Black pride and identity. The label turned survival cooking, once a marker of poverty, into a claimed cultural heritage, which also fixed a narrow Southern canon as 'the' Black cuisine.

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