You walk into the kitchen and the smells of home cooking greet you. You hear the clatter of utensils, the bubbling of something on the stove. As you sit down, a heaping plate of food is set before you, the same for those who are talking and laughing around you. And then you dig in…
Every reader of these words is picturing something uniquely different. The flavors and smells of their imaginings are different from yours’ and different from mine. The kitchen they walked into in their mind’s eye is different, the people they were surrounded by are different. Yet while our foods and fellowships are very different, there is one thing that is the same: Though most of our grumbling stomachs don’t know it, each bite we take has history within it.
Slow Down and Settle In: Explaining this Thesis Website
This is a thesis website, not a regular website. Some things can’t be rushed or conveyed in only a handful of words. Slow cooking, good stories and generational knowledge are among them. So make yourself a cup of coffee and settle in, because there is a lot of cooking and stories within these webpages.
These pages will sketch an outline of Gullah Geechee foodways (“the intersection of food in culture, traditions and history”1) and how these foodways intertwine with their land like muscadine vines. A single website cannot do justice to the full breadth and depth of Gullah Geechee culture, storytelling, agriculture, connections to land and sea, heritage and ancestry. The goal of this website isn’t to do that; the goal is to provide an engaging and understandable entry point for those who may not know anything about Gullah Geechee people and their histories.
Why a Website? Or: Methodology
I built this website as a digital space where the voices, recipes and stories of Gullah Geechee chefs can exist in conversation with one another. Where they can share their own stories in their own words and academic material has a supplementary role, to enhance the experience, not to overshadow it. That is why this website relies so heavily on pull quotes directly from the books of Gullah Geechee chefs and authors, as well as multimedia pieces—videos, audio clips and photos—so that you can see and hear from the storytellers themselves. It is also a way to amplify the voices of these authors, hopefully introducing new audiences to their work and histories.
The secondary goal of this website is to ensure that this information is open access to all. As we will see in later parts of the website, Gullah Geechee communities are all too familiar with scholars who didn’t share information about their communities and histories with Gullah Geechee people themselves. This website format is a direct effort to not do that.
Please comment!
There are comments sections on every page, please use that feature! Please use it to share your own experiences and thoughts, something you learned or find really interesting. Also, please use it to point out mistakes! This is the first time I have endeavored to create a website, and this is also a subject that I know enough about to understand how little I actually know. With all of that combined, there are undoubtedly errors in this website. Please use the comments sections or email me directly at hLgriffi@buffalo.edu to let me know about mistakes so that I can fix them and learn more.
I’m hoping this website will do for others what Vertamae Smart Grosvenor’s cookbook did for me: act as an entry point into the world of Gullah Geechee cooking, storytelling and history.
“I’m still on my journey, learning, eating, and cooking. But I’ve set a place for you now, so you’d betta come on in to my kitchen.”2
Vertamae Smart Grosvenor
Next Page:
Footnotes
- “Foodways,” Wikipedia, accessed March 27, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodways.
- Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 22. Available here.