Kat Kinsman, Author at The Archive Site for The Baltimore Times

In praise of ‘other mothers’

(CNN) — I had absolutely no right to cry over the death of Mrs. Howard. She wasn’t family, and I hadn’t seen her in more than 20 years. That didn’t stop me from crumpling onto the couch and howling like a kitten hurled from a moving car when I heard the news last year.

Between the damp, snotty sobs, I wracked my brain to figure out why word of Mrs. Howard’s death had struck me so squarely. I hadn’t kept in touch with my mother’s friend once I’d graduated from high school and fled my unhappy hometown life.

I poked at the space her loss had left, like examining the socket where a tooth was once firmly lodged. She’d had a dog, Piper, of which I was quite fond. She’d let me practice my piano lessons on her electric organ, and that was awfully nice. She’d taken me to the mother-daughter Girl Scout dinner…oh…

That was the raw nerve causing the ache. She’d filled in during at least one of many school-sanctioned mother-daughter outings when my mom was unable. It’s what lots of sisters, aunts, friends, neighbors, teachers do when they see a child in need of care and comfort. And Mrs. Howard did it for me.

My mother was and is unwell in ways I do and do not understand. It has been this way as long as I can remember. It’s not her fault; and it just simply is. And so I’ve been blessed with women — like Mrs. Howard, my mother’s twin sister and my own sister — who gracefully slipped in to fill the cracks as much as I’d let them.

I never asked these women to step in — mothers hold a vaunted role in our social structure, and you go with the one you’re given. No matter your circumstance, as a daughter it can sometimes feel like a betrayal to seek the care of another woman. One of the subtle gifts these other mothers give is making it so a child — of any age — never has to ask.

When a child’s struggles and scars are visible, sympathy is the immediate impulse. I recall walking past a classroom where our gentle-voiced hummingbird of a homeroom teacher was showing my friend Melissa how to sew buttons on shirts. She had lost her brother and her mother to cancer in the course of a few, cruel years.

While we, Melissa’s friends, fumbled for the words and actions that wouldn’t rip the wound wider, an army of women knit themselves around the motherless girl to bear her into womanhood as best they could.

While none of them could ever fully mend the ragged edge left by the loss of her mother, these women taught Melissa to cook and sew and shop for bras and inhabit the turbulent body of a girl entering adolescence. And over time, one of them finally fell so deeply into the rhythms of care, she became a permanent part of the family — as Melissa’s stepmother.

A childhood friend I’ll call Janet, so far as she would have any of us believe, sprung fully formed from the earth and as hard as bedrock around the heart. Her mother had bailed on the family when Janet was a very small child, leaving a weird and wounded pair behind in the rubble. But where Janet toughened, her father crumbled, and suddenly at some point in our teenage years, home wasn’t a safe and stable place for her to be.

Knowing she’d never ask, our friend Tina’s mother simply made an executive decision: Janet, you live here with us now. There are rules to our home and you will follow them, but now it is your home, too.

When iReporter Shawn Fontenot Yujuico was 17, she and her mother were hit head-on by a drunken driver. She survived, but her mother did not. To add insult to grievous injury, Yujuico and her brothers were sent to live with her father and stepmother, Shirley Fontenot, with whom she’d always clashed.

“My mother’s death made it hard to accept my stepmother. My younger brothers and I did the classic ‘You are not my mom’ routine, and we compared the two of them endlessly,” she writes.

Fontenot had three children of her own from a previous marriage and could have concentrated all her affection on them and her husband. Instead, she and Yujuico’s father did something extraordinary for the sake of their blended family: they remained married, but moved into separate houses to raise their children until all of them had graduated and moved out.

Yujuico explains, “They managed to get together on weekends here and there. And from time to time, they brought us all together and we began to soften. She just flat out loved us. She loved us over our brattiness, our ‘You are not Mother,’ over our heartbreak. She didn’t love us conditionally, she loved us with her whole heart.”

And years later, when Yujuico asked Fontenot why and how she’d found the strength to embrace angry stepchildren who were shoving her away at every turn, her answer was simple: “Because you were children and I was a grownup. That’s what grownups are supposed to do. I knew you were hurting.”

But the need isn’t always so clear-cut. iReporter Heather Gornick Jorgensen and her brother were fed, warm and clothed — but hunger isn’t always a physical thing. Their teenage mother was still going about the business of growing up, herself, when they were born. While her children’s biological needs were met, Jorgensen’s mother simply didn’t yet have the level of maturity necessary to sustain the souls of her children, too. Her maternal grandmother, Toni, took the nurturing role.

“The most important lesson I learned from my grandmother is that every child deserves unconditional love,” writes Jorgensen.

“While I was filled with insecurities and doubts, she was the one person who made me feel like I was perfect exactly as I was.”

Now in her 80s, Jorgensen’s grandmother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and Jorgensen is terrified — of losing one of the most important people in her life and also of her suffering. She is also ready to return the favor, love and lessons her other mother taught her throughout the years.

“I am grateful for the remaining opportunity I have to tell her that I love her, too,” Jorgensen said. “Unconditionally.”

And this Sunday, I will send my own mother flowers, with a note telling her that I love her, and thanking her for all that she has done for me. She is my mother, and that’s what a daughter does on Mother’s Day.

But that won’t be the only bouquet I send.

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As American as apple pie – the origins of picnic favorites

CNN — There’s nothing quite so American as gathering your friends and family to celebrate Independence Day with a classic cookout.

We polled Eatocracy readers a while back, and nearly 38,000 votes later, it seems that the ultimate summer menu would consist of a burger (cooked medium and topped with cheese, lettuce and onions), potato salad, corn on the cob and watermelon, washed down with plenty of ice cold beer.

Only in the U.S.A., right?

Well, not quite. While those dishes may now be synonymous with American life, liberty and the pursuit of a really great picnic, like most of the citizens themselves, often their origins are elsewhere.

Let’s start with that burger. Time Magazine’s Josh Ozersky asserts in his 2008 book, “The Hamburger: A History” that the modern day incarnation of the formed patty between two halves of a bun is “an American invention” with endless regional variations like the Connecticut steamed cheeseburger, Mississippi slugburger or Oklahoma onion burger. Various inventors have laid claim to that innovation, from Charles “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen, a vendor at the Seymour Fair in Wisconsin in 1885 and Fletcher Davis in Athens, Texas in the 1880s, to Frank and Robert Menches at the Erie Agricultural Fair in Hamburg, New York in 1885 (they also take credit for the invention of the ice cream cone at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904), or possibly Louis Lassen at Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut in 1900.

While it took some American ingenuity to slap meat on some bread and render it a hand held sandwich, the concept of the patty itself was brought to the United States by German immigrants who had become fans of the Hamburg Steak. This cheap, chopped or roughly ground beef was mixed with fillers like breadcrumbs, suet and onions, bound with eggs and seasoned with nutmeg. The meat, often salted and smoked for preservation, was brought over to the United States by immigrants on the Hamburg America Line and became a popular menu item on New York City restaurants that catered to German sailors and European immigrants, hungry for the flavors of home.

That beloved potato salad, too, was the provenance of primarily German immigrants who brought over the endless regional variations that became popular in the U.S. in the latter half of the 19th century. While Spanish explorers introduced spuds to Europe in the 16th century and a few French and British potato salad recipes can be found in the texts of that time (see Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery and Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook), the German versions – characterized by warm dressings featuring a heavy vinegar bite – prevailed. It took good old fashioned American engineering to add mayonnaise to create the creamy, often egg-laden versions seen in delis and gracing picnic tables across this great land today.

Corn on the cob – now, that’s one for the home team. Sweet corn – the variant of maize or field corn with a particularly high sugar content, which we use for cob consumption – was cultivated by Native Americans in the 1700s and shared with European settlers around the 1770s. It’s also extremely popular served as a Mexican street food called “elote.” In this preparation, cobs are grilled or roasted and slathered in condiments like lime, mayonnaise, cheese and powdered chiles.

Watermelon, ubiquitous at picnics from coast to coast, is believed to have originated in the Kalahari Desert of Africa. The melons were depicted in Egyptian heiroglyphics as far back as 5,000 years ago and were placed in the tombs of pharoahs to nourish them into the afterlife. Merchant ships brought the fruit to China by the 10th century, and that country remains the largest watermelon producer in the world. In his book “Southern food: at home, on the road, in history,” food historian John Egerton writes of watermelon’s introduction to the United States via African slaves, who also brought along okra, black-eyes peas, collard greens, yams and benne seed – also known as sesame.

And finally, to round out the feast: beer. Oh hoppy, malty, happy-making beer. Civilization has been brewing and quaffing permutations of beer since at least 6000 B.C., and studies show that Apache, Pueblo, Navajo and Tarahumara tribes in Northern Mexico and Arizona were no slouches, themselves – brewing a weak, corn-based beer called tiswin at least 1000 years ago.

Archaeologists also found evidence of fermented residue associated with beer production in 800 year old pots belonging to Pueblo tribes in what is now New Mexico. This contradicts previous assertions that the area had remained dry until the Spanish arrived in the 16th century with grapes and wine.

And as for that apple pie? English, Dutch and Swedish recipes go back centuries, but it’s believed that mock apple pie – made without apples – was invented by pioneers traveling out West in the mid-1800s. The ingenious travelers used similar spices to evoke the taste of the bounty they missed from back East.

Now that’s the flavor of good ol’ American ingenuity.

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Paula Deen and Southern food: Critics say credit is past due

CNN — No matter how you slice it, Southern food is complicated. Some detractors dismiss the whole menu as an over-larded, gravy-drenched, carbed-up monolith; they clearly just haven’t been invited to the right homes for supper.

At its core, Southern food is one of the most multilayered, globally-influenced and constantly evolving cuisines on the planet. It’s inextricably and equally tied to the rhythms of the seasons and the lives of the people who cook it the way their grandmother did, and her grandmother before her, and so on.

No one cooks Southern food alone; there’s always a ghost in the corner giving guidance. For millions of people, that’s Paula Deen, a celebrity chef whose sugary, bubbly bonhomie has earned her the moniker “Queen of Southern Cooking” – as well as her share of critics.

Deen has come under fire in the past for promoting aggressively unhealthy recipes, then failing to disclose her diabetes diagnosis for three years before picking up a lucrative endorsement deal for a drug to treat it. Her more recent admission of a racial slur in the past and that she had once discussed putting on a “plantation-themed” wedding party – complete with waiters dressed in a manner reminiscent of slaves – has proven even more sickening to some.

Internet backlash was fierce and pointed, and at least four of Deen’s major sources of revenue – the Food Network, Walmart, Caesars Entertainment and Smithfield Foods – have cut ties with her and condemned her words. Although many fans have gone out of their way to express support for her online and at her flagship restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, Deen apologized in online videos and in a teary appearance on the Today Show.

But some African-American food and culture scholars find it’s what Deen didn’t say that’s the bitterest pill to swallow. They claim that she has profited off the culinary legacy of African Americans, a group she’s repeatedly failed to credit in her cookbooks or on her television shows. Their contributions to American cuisine are often marginalized in the food world, despite having introduced rice cultivation techniques to the South, along with watermelon, okra, chile peppers and other foods that were already part of the African palate. Representatives for Deen weren’t immediately available to comment on the issue.

In the wake of the controversy, pre-orders for Deen’s cookbook are red-hot, but some feel frozen out.

“We’re burned by this,” says writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis. “Why does she get all the money and fame around the food that our ancestors created and sweated over?”

Davis argues that minimizing the role of the African-American culture’s contributions to Southern cooking isn’t unique to Deen, but fallout from a cultural system that needed to dehumanize slaves to keep the status quo. “Completely divorcing us from our history, our cuisine, our languages – that’s just all par for the course. You can’t let people have pride and then have them be your slaves.”

Culinary historian Michael Twitty agrees. “Our ancestors were not tertiary to the story of Southern food,” he says. “Whenever our role is minimized to just being passive participants or just the ‘help,’ it becomes a strike against culinary justice.”

“Paula Deen once did hoecake on her show and never once mentioned that this was the hardtack and daily bread of enslaved people,” he adds. So were, “gumbo, okra soup, red rice, fried chicken, black eyed peas, various greens, sweet potatoes, boiled peanuts, cala, jambalaya, hot sauce, barbecue, the list goes on.”

In Deen’s autobiography, “It Ain’t All About the Cookin’,” Deen touches on her dealings with the African-American community in her hometown, saying, “None of us were strangers to the black community, although they seemed to live their lives and we lived ours. I would say we lived a pretty unexamined life in terms of politics or civil rights.”

Perhaps if Deen were just “a cook” and not “the Charles Barkley of food,” as Syracuse University scholar Boyce Watkins argued in a discussion with Davis on CNN’s AC360, that lack of context around her food would be understandable and even acceptable. But as Davis pointed out, “She’s a brand.”

That brand reportedly pulled in more than $17 million dollars in 2012 alone, and Davis ascribes Deen’s lack of connection in some part to that level of success.

“We all related to her when she was at the bottom and worked her way up, ” Davis says. “When you put money in it and you’re in a different class, you get all the benefits of being white and privileged. Your sensitivity and need to know about us goes away. There’s nothing in your life that brings about the urgency of knowing about the culture you’re benefiting from.”

Twitty and Davis are both eager to have some potentially difficult and painful conversations – over a meal.

Twitty is on a mission of reclamation and healing in a project he calls The Cooking Gene. He spent much of 2012 on the “Southern Discomfort Tour,” visiting the former plantations where his ancestors were enslaved, meeting the descendents of the people who claimed ownership over his family, and sharing meals together. Through breaking bread in these haunted locales and having difficult conversations with people of all races, Twitty seeks to dispel any romantic notions of slavery, and begin to heal.

“I think the enduring myth is that slavery was a time when blacks knew their place, didn’t make trouble and served as the perfect status symbol of Western superiority and white supremacy. Nothing could be more un-American or untrue,” Twitty says.

“People who worked in the ‘big house’ didn’t have it easy. Women and men who cooked and served usually had one of three fates. They were often treated abusively and savagely punished; they could be family figures of great respect and trust or they were autocrats who used their unique role to carve out a special power niche with lines and boundaries not to be crossed.”

Cooking meant power in many cases, Twitty says, and per plantation records, good cooks were often “worth” more than a “plain” or “tolerable” cook.

There’s power in owning your culture’s narrative, Davis says, and it’s painful when a thing that should be a great source of pride and joy is instead used as a vehicle for shame. “Fried chicken is creative. Collards with smoked neckbones is creative,” Davis says.

“This generation gets to say, ‘No! Fried chicken is amazing!’ Everybody gets to participate in it, but let’s be clear about whose brilliance made this thing be popular.” It worries her that Paula Deen and Colonel Sanders are seen as “the face of fried chicken,” and sees it as a failure of an educational system that diminishes African-American contributions to history.

“We are the fried chicken makers – everybody’s grandma, Sadie, whomever, can make some fried chicken that would make your wig fall off,” she says. “African-Americans being ashamed to eat fried chicken or watermelons is heartbreaking and in complete alignment of the philosophical alignment of oppression and slavery. You’re made to turn against yourself and abandon your culture.”

Davis combats that in the kitchen, she says. While she doesn’t fry chicken every Sunday like her grandmother did, she corrals her daughter a couple times a year to show her how it’s done. Her daughter is from the lean-chicken-breast-on-the-grill generation, Davis jokes, but there’s a serious point: “We lose our food, we lose our stories.”

“I would sit in the kitchen while my grandmother told the story about her grandmother made this pound cake – as she’s making it and I’m watching,” she recalls. “I remember that she would use the notches in her fingers as measurements.

“It wasn’t precise, but there were all these stories and our history was completely folded up in telling these stories as you’re sitting in the kitchen and watching your grandmother and your mother cook. This happens with everybody. That’s why they call it ‘soul food.'”

And that’s what Davis wishes Deen would acknowledge – that she’s peddling and profiting off the food part, but leaving the soul behind.

Deen writes frequently about learning in the kitchen at her Grandma Paul’s side, and shares that story with a wider audience. African-American food traditions were often shared orally, and only within the community, Davis says. She now believes they need to take control over their own story, document it and spread the gospel. Cookbooks by African-American celebrities like Pearl Bailey and Patti LaBelle are a great start, but there needs to be more, and in cooks’ own words.

“If our stories aren’t told correctly and through a proper lens, we get cut out of the narrative,” Davis says.

“In those kitchen moments, my grandmother and grandfather’s life became real to me. We have to write it down. We’re not living in a time where people are eating fried chicken for four or five hours on Sunday, with anybody. This is the perfect time to take our oral history, film it, write it down so it’s not lost.”

Food justice activist and podcast host Nicole A. Taylor, a native Southerner, said in a recent video blog that she’s “done with Paula Deen,” but that the incident sheds a light on the food world needing more African-American representation on Food Network and in mainstream media outlets.

“We need to show that the South is just not Paula Deen,” she said. “The South is me. The South is immigrants who are moving here. We need to lift these people up so that Paula Deen does not become the poster child for what is Southern in terms of food.”

And Twitty would like to sit down and talk about it over a meal. In a much-read open letter to Deen on his website yesterday, he invited the embattled chef to a gathering at a historic plantation in September when he’s hosting a fundraiser for Historic Stagville, a North Carolina, plantation that once held 900 slaves and is now a historic tourist destination.

“I want you to walk the grounds with me, go into the cabins, and most of all I want you to help me cook,” Twitty wrote. “If you’re brave enough, let’s break bread…This isn’t publicity this is opportunity. Leave the cameras at home.”

Davis, too, believes in the power of food to soothe and stitch painful rifts. “Food and music are the foundations of African-American – and American culture. They’re a perfect way to talk about race and move forward. And they’re a thing that people love about us, and we love about us – but it’s been abused,” she says.

Davis continued, “The first thing you have to do is admit that it’s happened, talk about it, move on and forgive. Have a conversation over a meal with some music. These conversations: This is the work. This is how we heal.”

Want to know more about African American contributions to Southern cooking? Dig in:

Books (note: some are out of print, but available through used book stores):

The African American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes & Fond Remembrances – Carolyn Quick Tillery
Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time – Adrian Miller (Coming August 15)
Mama Dip’s Kitchen – Mildred Council
The Taste of Southern Cooking – Edna Lewis
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America – Jessica B. Harris
Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America – Frederick Douglass Opie
A Taste of Heritage: The New African American Cuisine – Toni Tipton-Martin and Joe Randall
The Dooky Chase Cookbook – Leah Chase