Basic Ingredients- Crops and produce brought through the Middle Passage
From the well-known okra and black-eyed peas, to turnip and poke greens, commonly used produce found its way to North America from Africa. Some hit stops along the way, such as Jamaica and Portugal. Okra holds the term “gumbo” in Africa, and is the main ingredient in its appropriately labeled dish made famous in New Orleans. During slavery in South Carolina, it served an alternate purpose as a coffee substitute (Holloway). Okra is one of the original crops that came to the New World in the 1600s. Black-eyed peas became another widely used crop in America. These peas, also known as "cowpeas", migrated from Jamaica to the West Indies and finally arrived in Florida in 1700 through the transatlantic slave trade (Carney). They reached North Carolina by 1738 and Virginia in 1775. By the time of the American Revolution, black-eyed peas had become one the most popular crops. Turnips and poke greens can also be traced back to Jamaica. Collard greens and dandelion greens were first recorded to be used in 1887, however they did not come to America on the Middle Passage. Legumes did arrive in the United States during this time. Peanuts were brought to Africa from the Portuguese before making their way to America. Sesame seeds, although they were used as oil among the Europeans, showed up in South Carolina by 1730 in seed form, and helped supplement foods such as bread, greens and soups. Other produce credited as being brought over during the transatlantic slave trade includes crops such as watermelon, yams, rice and millet. Rice first arrived in 1685 from Madagascar and was successfully grown for the first time in the South Carolina Sea Islands (Holloway). With knowledge of the foods listed above, African-American cooks, mainly women, found ways to transform scraps from the master’s kitchen in order to supplement slaves’ diets for mere survival, which carried through traditional cooking practices into the 20th century.