Sweet Potato Pie

Wendy Waren and Drue Deshotels (New Orleans) with a delicious sweet potato bread pudding.

Sweet Potato Cake

Gwen Cashio (Destrehan) with a fantastic New Orleans Rum Company sweet potato rum cake.

Youth

Seth Osborne (Gretna) with a very impressive sweet potato flan cake.

Congratulations!

We also had a great event at the Alvar Public Library this past weekend, with the showing of Trickster at the Gate. It was a great performance and it really brought Zora Neale Hurston to life.

Coming up this weekend, we have two discussions of the book being held at the Latter Branch and the Mid-City Branch of the New Orleans Public Library. Both will be from 12:30 to 1:30, Friday at the Latter Branch and Saturday in Mid-City. Chris Smith will be leading the sessions, examining the issues of racial identity, the role of women, the concept of love, and of course, its food. These events are free and open to the public.

We hope everyone took inspiration from the marvelous cake by Cake Cafe to get ready for the Sweet Potato Cake/Pie contest we’ll be holding on November 7. Please experiment with the delicious sweet potato to create the winning dessert! Just bring it in on that Saturday for your chance to win fun prizes and be recognized as the Sweet Potato King or Queen! Go to our website for more information!

There will be music from the local recording company Putumayo, and book signings from local writers including Sara Roahen, author of Gumbo Tales; Jerry Strahan, Managing Ignatius; and Bill Loehfelm, Fresh Kills and Bloodroot.

In addition, the Museum is also welcoming attendees of the First Annual Words and Food Symposium, as well as celebrating the opening of three new exhibits: reviewing the history and social impact of bananas in Bananas Iz Our Bizness, showcasing the fine work of the Red Beans and Rice Walking Krewe with their unique Mardi Gras costumes, and discussing the Worlds Fairs of New Orleans and their impact on cooking and culinary identity.

The Museum will be joined by The New Orleans Public Library; One Book One New Orleans;WRBH Radio; the Jefferson Parish Public Library; the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society; and others.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum: Riverwalk Marketplace (Julia Street Entrance) 504-569-0405 or info@southernfood.org. There is no admission charge for the party.

Born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th century, not simply for her influence on subsequent African-American writers but also for the passionate voice she gave to black culture in this country. 

After attending Howard, Columbia and Barnard universities, Hurston began her career as a folklorist and social anthropologist, traveling to Haiti to study the voodoo tradition. She quickly rejected the distanced, scientific attitude of the researcher, in order to become immersed in the culture. In two volumes, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse(1938), Hurston gathered the tales of the American South and the Caribbean. 

Hurston is best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that created controversy by refusing to admit black inferiority while simultaneously refusing to depict its characters as victims of a world that thought them inferior.

Hurston died penniless in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her work was largely forgotten and all of it was out of print. In 1973, African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and marked it as hers. Walker wrote an article titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” for the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. This article revived interest in her work. Her works were republished and have been in print ever since.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins with the reader’s eyes fixed on a woman who returns from burying the dead. Written in only seven weeks while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel chronicles the journey of Janie Mae Crawford from her grandmother’s plantation shack to Logan Killicks’ farm, to the all-black community of Eatonville, to the Everglades, until a tragedy brings her back to Eatonville. From this vantage point, Janie narrates her life story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson, satisfying the “oldest human longing – self-revelation.”

Forced to marry for money at 16, Janie at first believes that love automatically comes with marriage. Unable to endure her mule-like servitude and the desecration of her dreams, she spontaneously leaves Logan for Joe Starks, a handsome, ambitious man determined to put her on a pedestal once he becomes mayor of Eatonville. After enduring a mostly joyless 20-year marriage to him, Janie finally meets a young, uneducated wastrel named Tea Cake. She thinks she can find with him genuine love for the first time, but fate intervenes, and Janie must choose between his safety and her own. 

Although the novel is not an autobiography, Hurston once reflected that it is a love story, inspired by a real love affair in her life. She also fictionalized another important incident in her life in the novel: In 1929, Hurston survived a five-day hurricane in the Bahamas, getting herself and another family out of a house before it began to collapse. 

Hurston’s conviction that black culture is valuable, unique and worthy of preservation comes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God via its harmonious blend of folklore and black idiom. In Janie Mae Crawford, Hurston rejects 19th- and early 20th-century stereotypes for women and creates a protagonist who, though silenced for most of her life, ultimately finds her own voice.