Easter Series: Food and African and African American Religion Part 5

Rice pudding, recipe below



The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer had an opportunity to visit a southern revival meeting in which enslaved African Americans, freemen, and white commoners attended in Macon, Georgia, in May of 1850. “After the service came the dinner hour, when I visited several tents in the black camp, and saw tables covered with all kinds of meat, puddings, and tarts; there seemed to be a regular superfluity of food and drink.” Bremer’s description of this Georgia camp meeting is reminiscent of travelers’ descriptions of singing and feasting during West African religious gatherings discussed in earlier post and the first chapter of my book Hog and Hominy. The point here is that African and southern American religious events, with their singing and abundance of food, played an important role in shaping African-American religious tradition like Easter. Here is a rice pudding recipe that reminds me of rural Georgia cuisine: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/rice_pudding/