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Explore the culinary traditions of Juneteenth and why it’s time to reframe our thinking

As a native, lifelong Texan and former Houstonian of African American descent, I’ve never not celebrated the holiday commemorating the liberation of enslaved African peoples in Texas known as “Juneteenth.” I grew up in Houston, so close to Galveston (where delayed notice of the federally mandated end of the institution of slavery was delivered), and my paternal grandfather was a Black cultural historian and avid community activist, so taking part in convivial and commemorative gatherings to annually acknowledge June 19, 1865, has been as natural as celebrating Christmas.

My paternal grandfather, Henry, whom in true-to-form Southern dialect we referred to as Pawpaw, was a native Texan born in the very early 1900s and raised in the small country county of Montgomery. Montgomery was rooted in a blue-collar economy (cotton production and sawmills) and had a deep history of slavery (in the 1850s, four out of every 10 residents were enslaved), with forced labor centered on picking cotton and harvesting crops of corn, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, peaches, melons, and plums. It was this upbringing that sparked his passion for activism and a deep love for Black history, people, and culture. With the very first Juneteenth celebration occurring just 40 years prior to his birth, it was important to him that honoring and celebrating the holiday and its traditions should be ingrained as a family legacy.

After getting married he moved from Montgomery to Houston, where he eventually retired to become a staunch community activist, the family griot, and a full-time small independent cattle rancher and farmer. Pawpaw planted pecan, fig, persimmon, and plum trees (the plums likely a nod to his Montgomery days) along with a farming garden of beets, collard greens, mustard greens, snap peas, and tomatoes.

What he instinctively chose to plant couldn’t have been any more quintessentially Southern in the culinary sense, and in many ways, it set the stage for how we would celebrate our ancestors’ liberation through food and family.

Memories of a Summer Celebration

Some of my earliest Juneteenth memories are of my immediate family, my paternal aunts and uncles, cousins,and extended family all gathering early in the day at my grandparents’ house where the day’s activities would include being regaled with tales of Pawpaw’s upbringing and the history of June 19. There were also the usual kids’ antics: playing game after game of freeze tag, feeding Pawpaw’s cows, sneaking ripe plums and figs off the tree and popping them straight into our mouths, and listening to vinyl albums in the garage.

But one of our favorite and most significant parts of the day came when it was time to fill our bellies with a spread of epic proportions. The celebration’s carte du jour would include a dishes such as home-cooked barbecue chicken, St. Louis-style spareribs, fried chicken, fried okra, black-eyed peas and rice, hamburgers and hot dogs, deviled eggs, baked beans, collard greens, green beans, and potato salad.

Dessert often meant my Aunt Lillie-B’s scrumptious “berry pie,” a blackberry cobbler-style treat made with fruit picked from a patch that naturally grew in her backyard. However, the most coveted sweets were the towering, multilayered cakes made by my grandmother Thelma. Known as Nana Mama (“nana” in Ghanaian culture means “royalty” and is a title of respect to denote monarchs, chiefs, and elders), my grandmother would make her famously decadent coconut cakes, German chocolate cakes, and/or yellow cakes with chocolate icing, often pulling them right out of the oven upon our arrival. Once they’d cooled, all of the children watched with wide-eyed glee as she’d interchangeably use her long metal spatula and a butter knife to frost the cakes to perfection before liberally sprinkling on dried coconut flakes, toasted pecans, or other tasty flourishes.

Now that I’m an adult, my creative license surmises these bountiful feasts subconsciously emanated from the desire to make a statement: The days of having to accept food of subjugation and being malnourished human chattel were over—and for good.

From Culinary Culture to Modern Traditions

While our Juneteenth menus might vary from year to year, it was always going to adhere to the cultural tradition of having red-hued food and drink. The narratives surrounding the origins of this custom have roots in symbolism, history, and African food heritage. The color red was said to symbolize the bloodshed of our African ancestors, whether lost at sea during the Middle Passage or from the brutalities of slavery after reaching American shores. Additionally, in Yoruba and Kongo cultures, the color red represents sacrifice, power, and transformation—a narrative that speaks to the courage to survive and overcome. The significance of red beverages is also particularly symbolic due to the association with drinks made from the red hibiscus and cola nut that enslaved Africans smuggled with them to try to retain some connection to their ancestral homes.

For Black Americans honoring this custom means eating strawberries (fresh or in pies), cherries, tomatoes, watermelon, plums, fiery red hot links, red rice (a staple of the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina brought over from West Africa), and red velvet cake. As for beverages, proper choices include strawberry soda, fruit punch, and hibiscus tea—and a modern take is to drink red wines from Black-owned winemakers, vineyards, and brands, too.

Juneteenth feasts are a glorious representation of the many different expressions of cultural uniqueness and culinary influence of people of color from across the African diaspora, which, after melding with the Euro-influenced foodways brought to North America as well as those of Native and Indigenous peoples, birthed what we now know as soul food.

Unfortunately, soul food also has a longstanding history of derogatory connotations. Historical accounts reveal enslaved Africans in the United States received meager rations of cornmeal, flour, lard, meat remnants, peas, molasses, and greens. Despite oppressed people exhibiting culinary genius by transforming undesirable, leftover bits, pieces, and entrails into delicious sustenance, African Americans—and particularly Black people of Southern descent—have been systematically ridiculed, shamed, and negatively stereotyped over the foodways they created from nothing.

If Juneteenth represents a celebration of the freedom and liberation of Black people, shouldn’t that freedom and liberation also extend to being unshackled from the negative tropes imposed upon the foodways of our history that sustained us? Oxtails deserve the same adoration as osso bucco. Hog’s head cheese should have the same regard as French rillettes and terrines. Why can’t hog maws be coveted the same way other offals and sweet breads are? Why is guanciale a coveted Italian pork, but hog maws and jowls aren’t even though they are a similar cut? Isn’t salt bacon just a form of pork belly?

It’s time to remove the culinary bias, reframe the narratives, and shift our palate perspectives when it comes to foodways that evolved from the resilience and ingenuity of enslaved people in the South by embracing and elevating them as the inventive, gourmet-level representations of culinary artistry that they are. Open your proverbial culinary mind and welcome in a fantastic breadth of cultural flavors—your mouth will be grateful, and those you share it with will be, too.