“We had all de eats we wanted while de war was shootin' dem guns, kaze Marse George was home an' he kep' de niggers workin'. We had chickens, gooses, meat, peas, flour, meal, potatoes an' things like dat all de time, an' milk an' butter too, but we didn' have no sugar an' coffee. We used groun' pa'ched cawn for coffee an' cane 'lasses for sweetnin'. Dat wuzn' so bad wid a heap of thick cream. Anyhow, we had enough to eat to 'vide wid de neighbors dat didn' have none when surrender come.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
When the cods be but young, string them and pick off the husks; then take two or three handfuls, and put them into a pipkin with half a pound of sweet butter, a quarter of a pint of fair water, gross pepper, salt, mace, and some sallet oyl: stew them till they be very tender, and strain to them three or four yolks of eggs, with six spoonfuls of sack.
Sources: The passage is from United States. Work Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from , free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — teal cloth, goose stamp.