Killien Huynh
Matriculation at historically Black colleges and universities is more than late-night study sessions: It’s a balancing act between academics and discovering merriment, and learning how to be. It’s routine to walk the same grassy quadrant as ancestors who believed education was a weapon, while making plans to let off steam.
At homecoming, the uniqueness of the Black college experience is on full display for everyone to take in.
“Homecoming is a lifestyle,” said Michiel Perry, the creator of Black Southern Belle, a website focused on Black American women in the South, and a graduate of Howard University. (Ms. Perry’s site has featured one tailgater at the Magic City Classic — the nation’s largest H.B.C.U. game, between Alabama A&M and Alabama State — smoking a bacon-wrapped alligator clenching a whole pineapple in its mouth.)
Food and fellowship have long been the main attractions at H.B.C.U. homecomings, many of which are held in October and November. At the nation’s about 100 H.B.C.U.s, ordinary and extraordinary people have long raised a glass and broken bread to honor their alma maters, on campus (affectionately referred to as “on the yard”) or hundreds of miles away.
When cooking for my family at home, I rarely use recipes. Instead, I’ll pull from a collection of what I refer to as culinary building blocks. And I’m not talking about a mental library of recipes and techniques (though those can help). I’m talking about actual, physical things.
Open my fridge, and you’ll find a shocking number of plastic deli containers and Mason jars. Homemade and store-bought sauces, dressings, condiments, pickles, chile oils, sauce bases, concentrated stocks, curry pastes — anything that can add a quick, easy boost of flavor to my meals — take up a good 40 percent of my shelf space.
Most restaurant walk-in refrigerators are similar. Fresh produce and raw meat might make up half the real estate, while the other half might be devoted to these building blocks. They’re an essential step in operational efficiency. There’s a reason restaurants are able to serve dishes that taste like they took all day to prepare between the time you placed your order and the time you finished your appetizer. Most likely, those meals were made from building blocks that did take all day, with only the final bits — searing the salmon filet or grilling the chicken breast — done à la minute.
These building blocks vary by cuisine, and by chef, but they all invariably have an extra-long shelf life (typically weeks, if not months) and concentrated flavor. In fine dining or seasonal restaurants, where menus shift daily based on market ingredients, they’re critical, not just to ensure that seasonal dishes come out tasting good with very little time to iterate or test, but to maintain the flavor identity; that is, the ingredients, preparations and aromas that lend cohesion to a restaurant experience or are unique to a particular chef.
A friend wrote to tell me about fake green olives. When you write a book about adulterated, contaminated, and fake foods, you get a long list of examples from everyday news in your inbox. I started a running tab of these messages, before quitting after it topped 100. The list ranged from ersatz spinach, calamari, whiskey, pomegranate juice, olive oil, and honey to bogus coffee, almond milk, parmesan cheese, wine, chocolate, cantaloupe, and cereal. I’d sometimes get notices of GMO-related controversies too, because people weren’t sure how to fit the genetically modified foods into a real/fake schema. I think they wanted me to say whether these would be OK to eat, but all I thought was: Who decides what counts as “genuine,” and what assumptions are they using?
I’ve since moved on from the list, bookmarking the Food and Drug Administration’s section on the Recalls.gov website, with its near-daily notices of contaminated or fraudulent foods. It got tiring. Rebecca Solnit once wrote that “none of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to the Puritans.” Yet the fight for pure food would seem to be never-ending.
My catalog of food-identity angst was full of echoes from the past. Two hundred years ago, Fredric Accum became the first chemist to tabulate a list of food grievances into a book. A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons (1820) called out “counterfeiting and adulterating tea, coffee, bread, beer, pepper, and other articles of diet.” Accum framed the problems in starkly moralistic terms: nefarious, mercenary, criminal, unprincipled, fraudulent, and evil. And that was just the preface. He drew his biblical epigraph, “There is death in the pot,” from Kings 4:40. His frightening cover graphic showed a hollow skull and intertwined snakes. This would be the tip of the spear: In the decades ahead, a new library emerged of anti-adulteration, pro-purity compilations.
By the end of Accum’s century, grocery shelves had created a world so full of suspected fakes and frauds that consumers thought the problem was getting worse. By then it was the Gilded Age, after all, where a layer of thin gold disguised the true rot and corruption festering just below the surface. Accum’s worries over bulked-up coffee, bread, and tea seemed quaint beside the newly apparent risks of tainted food. Watered-down ingredients were one thing; having arsenic in your chocolate or borax in your beef would be a notch more disconcerting. Yet they all fell under the umbrella of food fears. Anti-adulteration advocates doubled down on moral religiosity in their call for pure food “crusades.” At root was a matter of confidence and faith. For them, trusting food meant trusting people.