‘Setting a place at the table’: The black chefs unearthing history
Deep in the hills of central Georgia, past a church built by freedmen, lies an overgrown farm with a vulture roosting in the smokehouse.
Sweetgum grows through the grill of a ’70s muscle car. Blackberry brambles hide the chicken coop.
Under the gaze of a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., Mike and Shyretha Sheats are sanding the floors of the small farmhouse, shoring up the roof and the sills. They are preparing to transition from a big-city restaurant career in Atlanta to a rural stage for Southern slow cooking, from barn-hung hams to collards with the bitterness cooked out of them.
The Plate Sale will be a testament to what is known by family lore as the “home house,” where the men made the sausages and the women adjusted the seasonings.
Mr. Sheats is one of a growing number of black chefs grasping this moment to unearth 400 years of history redolent in dishes like oyster porridge and catfish in shrimp gravy.
From Seattle to Charleston, South Carolina, from Houston to Athens, Georgia, black food entrepreneurs are exploring the deep, but often underappreciated, effects of black cuisine and agricultural prowess on a whitewashed culture. This exploration takes places against a continuing backdrop of national unease over skin color, heritage, and legitimacy.
“There’s this stereotype that black culture is a culture created on the fly, and that it’s not rooted,
‘A history lessons that was never told’‘Setting a place at the table’