When it comes to African American history, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., activist Rosa Parks, poet Maya Angeloue, and sportsman Muhammad Ali are often mentioned – But what do you know about other Black history heroes?
THIS FEBRUARY, FOH® IS PROUD TO HONOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND CELEBRATE THOSE LESSER KNOWN BUT PIONEERING FIGURES IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY.
ABBY FISHER
Abby Fisher was born into slavery in South Carolina and learned to cook in plantation kitchens. She and her husband eventually moved to San Francisco, Calif., with their family where they started a pickles and preserves business under the name Mrs. Abby Fisher and Company.
Building on the success of her food business, Fisher was encouraged to write a cookbook.
She was not literate, so she had to dictate all of the book’s content. The book, “Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” was published in 1881. It was one of the first cookbooks in the words of an African American woman and former slave and one of the earliest to also document the contributions of African Americans to American cuisine.
LLOYD AUGUSTUS HALL
Lloyd Hall was a chemist who helped develop several ways to preserve foods, including some still commonly used today. During his lifetime, he obtained many U.S. patents in food chemistry.
In 1932, he helped create a method of curing meats by combining salt and crystals of sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite to suppress the nitrogen that can spoil food. Before this development, meat was preserved primarily with salt alone, which adversely impacted its taste. Hall’s method for curing meats is still used today.
Hall’s research in food chemistry also impacted the use of antioxidants, including Lecithin, which stops the fats in foods from spoiling when exposed to oxygen. He is also credited for work in discovering that some spices used to preserve foods were introducing bacteria and mold, speeding up food spoilage. This led Hall to invent a purification system using ethylene oxide gas and a vacuum chamber to purify the spices. This system was later adapted to sterilize drugs and cosmetics.
FREDERICK MCKINLEY JONES
Frederick McKinley Jones was a largely self-taught inventor of mechanical and electrical devices. He was born in Covington, Ky., and served in France during World War I. In the 1920s, he moved to Minneapolis, where he worked for Joseph Numero, selling equipment to the movie industry. Jones later patented a box office ticket machine which automatically dispensed tickets and change to moviegoers. He also created machinery allowing projectors to play recorded sounds.
Frederick Jones was a very prolific inventor. While these inventions were helpful to the movie industry, his later work would greatly impact the food industry.
During the 1930s, Jones turned his attention to air conditioning for cars and trucks. While there are several different stories as to what inspired him to design refrigerated vehicles, his invention would change the transportation of meat and produce.
Until this invention of refrigerated vehicles, meat and produce were transported with ice, which could melt, causing food to spoil before reaching its destination.
JAMES HEMINGS
While Thomas Jefferson is sometimes credited with bringing foods like mac & cheese and ice cream to the United States, Hemings was the one who learned to make them. A slave in the ownership of Jefferson before his presidency, Hemings traveled with him to France in 1784 specifically to learn the art of French cuisine.
Hemings became the first American trained as a French chef in history as a result, bringing back several dishes to the United States. French fries, ice cream, macaroni and cheese, creme brulee, French meringues, and French whipped cream are just a few examples. These dishes and others would be incorporated in Hemings' signature half-French, half-Virginian style of cooking he became renowned for.
Hemings would later also cook one of the most famous dinners in American History: the one between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton that settled who would pay for the Revolutionary War and established Washington, D.C. as the United States' capital. He eventually was freed by Jefferson in 1796.
ALFRED L. CRALLE
Like ice cream? Cralle would go on to work as a porter at a drugstore and a hotel in Philadelphia, and developed the idea of the ice cream scoop while watching people struggle using two different spoons to get the ice cream into cones. Cralle's mechanical inventional, which is the basis of how ice cream scoops work to this day, was invented in 1897.
GEORGE CRUM
George Crum was the chef at said restaurant, the Moon Lake Lodge resort in Saratoga Springs. A customer came in around the summer of 1853 wanting extra-thin French Fries, frustrating Crum to the point he sliced them as thin as possible, fried them in grease, and sent them out.
The chips became a big hit, eventually becoming known as "Saratoga Chips." While Crum never patented the dish, he did open his restaurant, "Crumbs House," that served a basket of them at every table.
Chips wouldn't become a grocery product until 1895, and the concept of bagged chips didn't show up until 1926.
ALEXIS NIKOLE NELSON
Known on social media as "Black Forager", Nelson has drawn more than 2 million followers. For those not familiar with the term, Nelson says foraging is essentially "a very fun way to say, I eat plants that do not belong to me and I teach other people how to do the same thing." The videos she posts showcase her collecting and cooking everything from acorns to yellow dandelions to dead man's fingers (AKA the seaweed codium fragile.)
But for Nelson, foraging goes beyond rummaging around in other peoples' shrubbery. It's a way to connect with African American and Indigenous food traditions that many people were discouraged — or actively prevented — from accessing.
Check out our Instagram highlight for ways to celebrate black history month.