Rural Louisiana Christmas Suppers.

In Antebellum Louisiana, enslaved Africans and white masters alike in the rural sugar producing regions associated open pit barbecue with Christmas. Customarily one wealthy sugar cane planter hosted a Christmas in which he or she would invite as much as “three to five hundred” enslaved Africans “from neighboring plantations to join his own on the occasion,” the former Louisiana slave Solomon Northup tells us. He goes to say, the slaves would come “on foot, in carts, on horseback, on mules, riding double and triple,” for the food and fellowship around a large table “spread in the open air, and loaded with varieties of meat and piles of vegetables.” Open pit barbecued meats cooked “in the shade of wide branching trees” proved to be the main culinary attraction of these rural integrated Louisiana Christmas suppers held before the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow. The enslaved Africans, who had experience barbecuing back in Africa, would dig a ditch in the ground and fill it with wood “burned until it is filled with glowing coals, over which chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and not [in]frequently the entire body of a wild ox [were] roasted.”