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Quote by Kelley Fanto Deetz

“The currency of proper food was so important that the teaching of basic reading became essential to guarantee culinary delight. It can be presumed that this skill was valuable to the larger enslaved community as well, for they could rely on the cook to read and write for those who could not. in addition to reading, enslaved cooks learned basic math. Counting, fractions, and knowing how to double or triple a recipe was mandatory for large-scale plantation cooking.”

Quote by Kelley Fanto Deetz

Book:Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
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Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine

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Kelley Fanto Deetz

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“The web of enslaved labor was vastly interdependent, and each ingredient stemmed from another person's forced labor. Wheat was grown, harvested, and milled by enslaved farmers to provide flour to the cook to use in the kitchen. Brandy was made from fruit gown and harvested by slaves then fermented by the enslaved cook. Rum came from the Caribbean, starting as sugarcane planted, grown, cut, and distilled by enslaved hands. Feasting in Virginia meant consuming the labor of slaves, literally eating the fruits of their labor. To dine at an elite plantation during the antebellum and late colonial periods meant that one was, without question, intimately involved with slavery.”

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Book:Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
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“I was sure of myself, of everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death that was waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. So what? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to vindicate me. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout this whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from the depths of my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed it leveled all that had been possible in the equally unreal years that I was living. What did the death of other people or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.”

FateAlbert Camus
Book:The Stranger
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