Ntosake Shange’s Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo

Ntosake Shange in 1979 Courtesy of New York Public Library

Ntosake Shange (1948-2018) had been a Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s Born Paulette Williams, she changed her name in 1971. Her first name means she who comes with her own things; and her last name means she who walks with lions. Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and WEB Du Bois are some of the notable creative thinkers who visited her childhood home. She would go on to graduate from Barnard College and earned a Master’s degree in American studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo (St. Martin's Press, 1982) represents the first of three novels Shanges wrote and the most innovative with the inclusion of recipes. The novel is in part her portrait of African-American women struggling in the 1970s to balance the demands of feminism, Black Nationalism, creative inspirations, and the domestic expectations their communities acculturated with such as cooking, childrearing, and cleaning their homes.[1]

For Shange the recipes of African-American women recipes serve as their narratives and collectively as their archives. (150-151) For Shange, kitchen knowledge learned around the open stove provide a rich archival history of African-American women. Her use of recipes in the novel is a strategy for recovering history lost during the trauma of the African slave trade and enslavement. (151) Historically, the word receipt and recipe come from references to medical prescriptions the doctor would give as a remedy for his or her patient. Beginning in the 1740s the terms became associated with cookbooks.  In the pharmacology, the abbreviation RX has its history in the uses of the term recipe and/or receipt.[2]

I decided to last night to make vegetable soup to enjoy during a day of fasting on fruit and vegetables beverages and soup. Below are historical recipes from my own archives:

Winter Vegetable Soup Recipe

Scrape and slice three turnips and three carrots and peel three onions, and fry all with a little butter until a light yellow; add a bunch of celery and three or four leeks cut in pieces; stir and fry all the ingredients for six minutes; when fried, add one clove of garlic, two stalks of parsley, two cloves, salt, pepper and a little grated nutmeg; cover with three quarts of water and simmer for three hours, taking off the scum carefully. Strain and use. Croutons, vermicelli, Italian pastes, or rice may be added.

(F.L. Gillette, The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887)

Corn Husker Victory Vegetable Soup Recipe

1 cup young carrots, diced

1 cup fresh peas

1 cup celery, diced

1/4 cup minced onion

1 cup green beans, cut lengthwise

1 cup mushrooms

1 teaspoon salt

2 quarts beef stock

Instructions

Cook the vegetables in beef stock until tender. Add mushrooms which

have been cooked in one tablespoon butter. Season with salt and serve

hot.

(Crosby Gaige, New York World's Fair Cook Book: The American Kitchen, 1939)

Wisconsin Cream of Vegetable Soup Recipe

1 cup cooked potatoes (mashed)

1 cup cooked carrots (mashed)

or

1/2 cup peas and

1/2 cup carrots

1 cup beef stock well seasoned

(or two bouillon cubes in 1 cup water)

¼ very small onion, grated very fine

and browned in butter

1/2 cup celery chopped fine and cooked

4 cups milk

4 tablespoons butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

 Instructions

Combine all ingredients. Serve hot with finely chopped parsley. No

white sauce is needed as potatoes add sufficient starch. Serves six.

(Crosby Gaige, New York World's Fair Cook Book: The American Kitchen, 1939)

Soup Stories and Recipes

Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie 

Author

Babson Professor of History and Foodways

Host/Producer Fred Opie Show 

Editor Food History Blog

Host/Producer Online Teaching Survival Guide: A 7-Part Audio Series

Footnotes:

[1] Alexs Pate, “A Conversation with Ntozake Shange,” Black Renaissance Vol. 10, Iss. 2/3 (Summer 2010), 79; Harryette Romell Mullen, “Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere”: Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s” Meridians 4.2 (2004), 206, 208, 213.

[2] Patricia E. Clark, “Archiving Epistemologies and the Narrativity of Recepies in Ntozake Shange's Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo,” Callaloo, Volume 30, Number 1, (Winter 2007), 150-151, 153.