Yes, that’s what I had thought too. I have no doubt that many of our recipes are from Africa. Most people take any recipe and adjust it to their own taste. Recipes that were brought over from “the old country”, of whomever came to America, got “calibrated” and revised along the way to suit tastes according to background.
A friend and I got into a discussion about cooking greens...she hates them, and I love them. She was telling how her grandmother cooks them,which is similar to the way my m-i-l cooked hers. We were talking about the various meats and seasonings that we knew of some folks using to flavor collard greens, turnip greens, and mustard greens.
Popular methods used dry salt pork, hocks, or pork neck bones, to boil and flavor the water before adding the greens, then added other seasoning to taste.
The only greens that I liked using salt pork were mustard greens,or perhaps a mixture of mustard and turnip greens, and I didn’t like them unless much of the fat was removed from the broth before adding the greens. I was never a big salt pork fan.
Folks used to soak the dry salt pork that had a good marbling of lean in water to remove some of the salt and either fry it like bacon, or roll it in flour and fry it crisp (my husband still likes it cooked this way when he can talk me into doing it - lol). Some even dip it in a batter and fry it. Don’t think I could handle that one!
One of my grandmothers used to make a tomato soup with tomatoes, and onions and season it with bacon drippings. She served it with big fluffy biscuits. The other grandmother served cornbread with her soups, regardless of the type.
An elderly aunt used to cook tomatoes and onions in a skillet, with butter, salt, sugar, and pepper (similar to the okra and onions recipe). When they were tender and cooked down pretty good, she would add chunked left over biscuits, and stir the mixture together. Sounds awful, but tastes good.
LOL, over 50 years ago, when my husbands ship would pull out to sea, I would rush home and start cooking for a party.
A pot of beans w/salt pork, cornbread, turnip greens, fried potatoes, using bacon grease, Ice tea and buttermilk. Chopped green onions.
When it was ready, 3 other wives who liked my kind of food, came to dinner...........and we ate till we couldn’t eat another bite.
If a person was not from the south, then they did not have the taste for my kind of home cooking.
I had not the faintest idea of how to cook a thick steak ‘rare’.
I only knew tough cows that had to be made into “Chicken Fried” steaks, by pounding them with a thick saucer edge.
There was a bacon grease saver...hld about 3 cups and had a lid, with a strainer in the top..
There is a product sold for many years, called Liquid Smoke, that can be used in several dishes, as in beans, chuck roast and tastes like smoke, you use it by the drop and it is in a 4 ounce approx. square brown bottle.
We ate stewed tomatoes over bread, add a pinch of sugar and they were good.
We had gravy with every meal, but I almost got expelled in the 7th grade, the teacher attempted to teach me how to make “White Sauce”, using a double boiler..........LOL, she would not listen to me, when I told her that was not the way to make gravy.
I never did master white sauce, to me it was paste.
A friend introduced me to the perfect mess of greens, he picks a few leaves from what ever he has growing, chops them to med. bite sized pieces and uses them for salads, sandwiches, or even steamed with butter.
The first time he gave me a mess of them, I was not sure I would use them, LOL, I did and started planting for the same purpose.
We pinch the leaves off, leaving the plant to grow more, turnip, mustard, lettuce, swiss chard, and all the oriental greens, even a few weeds, purslane and amaranth go in the mix, with a few leaves off the onion plants, talk about good.
I would make them a gallon at a time and in less than a week, they would be gone.
I had not tried fried potatoes with the biscuits added in, should be good, my first thought was to add cornbread.
We also ate cornbread in a bowl with milk on it.
A friend grew up eating popcorn in a bowl with milk and sugar on it, said that was the first dry cereal.
You are correct about ‘adjusting the old recipes’, that we do, some that I see today, have only the name of the original recipe left.
I always made my potato salad with mashed potatoes, one day my mother was at the house and asked me why I mashed them.
I told her that she did, when I was a kid.........when she got over her laughter, she said “yes, I did make it with mashed potatoes, if they were leftovers, not from scratch”.
LOL, I hate biting into a hunk of cold tater, still like mine mashed.
You can hide a lot in mashed potatoes, I mix in summer squash, with pots and onion, or cabbage.
Thanks for the ideas, LOL, you never know when they will float through my brain again.
People never understood, why I read cookbooks like a novel, but I knew that i wanted the info in my brain, even if I was not going to make the recipe as written.