Stirring the Pot

Africars"s art of cooking is a key part of its history. All too often Africa is associated with famine, but in Stirring the Pot, James C. McCann describes how the ingredients, the practices, and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in households across Africa's diverse human and ecological landscape. McCann reveals how Africars"s tastes and culinary practices are integral to the understanding of African history and more generally to the new literature on food as social history. Stirring the Pot offers a chronology of African cuisine beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing from Africa's original edible endowments to its globalization. McCann traces African cooksrs" use of new crops, spices, and tastes, including New World imports like maize, hot peppers, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, as well as plantain, sugarcane, spices, Asian rice, and other ingredients from the Indian Ocean world. He analyzes recipes, not as fixed ahistorical documents, but as lively and living records of historical change in womenrs"s knowledge and farmersrs" experiments. A final chapter describes in sensuous detail the direct connections of African cooking to New Orleans jambalaya, Cuban rice and beans, and the cooking of Americansrs" "soul food." Stirring the Pot breaks new ground and makes clear the relationship between food and the culture, history, and national identity of Africans.

James C. McCann is a professor of history and the associate director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. He is the author of Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000, which was the winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History; and Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, which has been used in classrooms on five continents.