Pepper Pot
Pepper-Pot Woman at the Philadelphia Market, 1811 by John Lewis Krimmel.
Today another story in our series on art and food history. “The negro-woman lamented the ravages of the fever, because it prevented the sale of her pepper-pot,” wrote a traveler in 1803. A Philadelphia recipe for pepper pot called for herbs, onions, potatoes, and okra seasoned with pieces of smoked meat. This painting depicts the role of entrepreneurs in colonial America. In West and Central Africa women participated in the bustling trade in food staples and prepared foods, particularly in port cities and along trade routes. In the Americas, enslaved women worked as food venders selling candies, pastries, and bowls of a delicious piping out one pot meal like pepper-pot. Masters mandated that say 25 cents of every dollar the slave earned she could keep.
