Since colonial times, African Americans in the North have used food service as a vehicle for upward mobility.


Since colonial times, African Americans in the North have used food service as a vehicle for upward mobility. In 1732, the year of his emancipation, Emmanuel “Manna” Bernoon, a free black man in Providence, Rhode Island, opened an oyster and alehouse, the city’s first. In Philadelphia, African American waiters and butlers established catering companies that W.E.B. DuBois called “as remarkable a trade guild as ever ruled in a medieval city.” African American women in Philadelphia sold a spicy pepper pot stew that served as a local version of gumbo, while vendors in Baltimore peddled fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn wagons into the twenty-first century. In 1866, Malinda Russell, a free woman of color, published the first known African American cookbook, ‘A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen’ in Paw Paw, Michigan, a work that reflects both the tenacity and the culinary inventiveness of African Americans in the Northern States.

Purchase our Sweet Home Café: A Celebration of African American Cooking cookbook to learn more about the history of African American cuisine in the Northern states and to try out some Northern recipes for it. 

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