hi I'm John Townsen and we're here today at historic Gunston Hall home of George Mason a forgotten founding father in American history and we're right outside Washington DC I've got with me Michael Twitty he's a culinary historian how you doing I am doing very well and we are going to be doing an okra soup thanks for joining us today on 18th century [Music] cooking so Michael tell us a little bit about what you specialize what do you do so I am a food writer I'm a culinary historian and historic interpreter and I focus on the food ways of the enslaved from Africa to America From Slavery to Freedom from arrival to past reconstruction okay so that's my world view in terms of food and not just one particular area um the Chesapeake the Low Country the L Mississippi Valley the places in between uh the roots in the Caribbean in Brazil um and historic food WS in West Central Africa and how those food Wes have a a collision with European Native American foodways to create the basis of what southern Cuisines we know it is today and you're you're working on a book yes the cooking Gene from Harper Collins which traces my own family history through food mhm so when when is that going to be out August 2017 sounds great so tell us a little bit about this okra soup we're going to be doing today so okra is uh vegetable from tropical Africa okay um it's thousands of years old and it's pretty much found all over the continent it spread to Southern Asia and China and it traveled around the world partly because of the Portuguese slave trade so okra has been around for quite a while but for most Americans is a a southern vegetable um It's associated with the arrival of Africans in response to the slave trade particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries it probably started uh bounced from the Caribbean then to the South as opposed to directly coming over from Africa what we know about okra is that at least by 1740s whites and blacks in Philadelphia are growing this vegetable we don't really have a good grip on how old in the American South because it's you know the seeds don't exactly last too long in the AR Arch Botanical record um but pretty much we're talking about okra has been here since before the Revolution and would they have generally cooked it in a soup like we're doing today oh absolutely uh deep fried okra comes much later but okra soup is one of the foods that you could have found from Sagal to Angola that's the entire length of the West African Coast during the transatlantic slave trade so for our purposes okra can also be found in the Chesapeake okra soup um in the low country and also as gumbo in New Orleans so all the major points of southern food are touched upon by this one vegetable just as ochre would have been found among all the different kinds of peoples who came to the South during the charm of the slave trade M to start this recipe we need to create a rich broth the broth takes a while to develop and that's the real secret of the soup is that it's not just throw everything in a pot and let it boil in this case a little bit chicken broth a little beef broth what you want to do is have that onion with the cloves in it have you know any other things you want to put you can put herbs in that stage in my recipe I tend to put the herbs in the in the last part because they're fresh ah and I want that fresh burst at the end of the dish right some beef towel that we had throw that in there any any scraps so what we want to do is just have all of those flavors stew down the broth itself takes about an hour or two if you really want to have the full experience now that the broth is deed veloped we're going to continue making our soup so what we're doing is we're going to flour the um onions and garlic we're going to fry up we're going to use a little bit of modern lard AKA uh partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and a little bit of butter however um people are scared of lard and it's unfortunate because lard is natural um lard is no less healthy or unhealthy for you than other things and it would have been the typical fat use to fry things at that point especially in the South so we're going to use that little bit of butter to bring out the flavor help it brown but also create a base for the okra soup so we're going to take some small okra smallest okras we have um you want smaller okra because those are the ones that are going to be not so slimy so like you would want a summer squash when it's young and small you want okas when it's young and small exactly exactly exactly but okra needs to be cut very thin and the smaller the okra the better to start with that's how it works and also you think about it people think now soup in the middle of the summer well you know a better way to stay hydrated in a time period when there was very little clean water the best way to have clean water was to boil it I'm going to go ahead and add the okra as well as the onions um and then it's going to be followed by the tomatoes so tomatoes in the 18th and 19th century can be a tricky topic some different cult culturist thought of them as poisonous what do you think it's because they're night shades and night shades are technically poisonous plants but you would die of overeating Tomatoes before you actually die of eating tomatoes um same thing for potatoes uh or Peppers but the interesting part of it is that African Mediterranean um certainly Latin cultures at the time were all eating tomatoes frequently and the IAL Chesapeake we know for example that um Tomatoes were being grown like 172 1730s 1740s um people you can buy them in Market people were eating tomatoes uh and they certainly were um W distributed in West Africa and certainly a part of West Central African cuisine long before the arrival of Africans in the South so as I add the tomatoes to the pot I'm also going to add some kosher salt some kitchen pepper some black pepper and some herbs consisting of sage Thyme and rosemary so just to give it a little bit more flavor I'm adding a little bit of smoked protein smoked meat to the pot um which is pretty typical for this dish you can add spite anything you want but in this case we're adding a little bit of smoked turkey and last but not least I'm adding a little bit of fresh parsley and we're going to cook that down for about an hour then we're going to have a lovely pot of okra soup served on top of cooked rice wonderful for a lot of black interpreters you know they love to be you know part of various units um representing the soldiers during the Civil War and that is beautiful that's heroic and that's heroic and that's wonderful but as I often joke a lot of people want to play Glory nobody wants to play roots and you know it's tough but both of those stories need to be told the stories of free people of color and stories of black Civil War soldiers and abolitionists but also the everyday people who made up the bulk of the black population people who had lived for Generations in bondage and were hoping for their freedom and so I see it as my own personal mission to enter their world by doing the tasks by being an enslaved [Music] cook wonderful flavors the okra um it goes right along with it I mean it's not like it's got a flavor of its own but it Blends right in there with everything dances with other vegetables especially tomatoes and corn and rice right very so this has got some just amazing flavors in it the kitchen pepper actually makes it I think I think so yeah yeah wow excellent and little bits of meat in there yeah mhm and different colors I mean it's a very colorful sort of dish it's not monochromatic wow I've been missing out on okra all this time yeah eating more okra thank you so much for bringing us this wonderful okra soup The Taste is wonderful if you've missed out on ochre like I have give this a try this one is a wonderful recipe you really need to try it so thank you so much for bringing this and I want to thank everyone for coming along with us trying this out along with us savoring the flavors Aromas of the 18th century I want to thank everyone there at Gunston hall for their wonderful help with this series if you're interested in Gunston Hall make sure to check out their [Music] website