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Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Melody's Tomato Watermelon Salad

A tasty dish with some difficult history.

Today we're featuring a recipe that involves some pretty dark moments in American history. This watermelon tomato salad from the Sweet Home Cafe Cookbook published by the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a very interesting, refreshing side dish to any summer get together, but features an ingredient that has a pretty complicated and often upsetting history in the Black community. Its reputation as such is the fault of white supremacists looking to put down Black entrepreneurs in the wake of the Civil War. They took a symbol of Black freedom and entrepreneurship and turned it into an icon of Jim Crow America. 

I'm speaking, of course, about the watermelon.


Sweet Home Cafe at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) specializes in highlighting historically African American cuisine, spotlighting recipes developed by African Americans or common in areas with large Black communities. It's a great place to visit, just like the rest of the museum, although getting timed passes to visit can still be a challenge. I recommend following the museum on social media if you want updates about when passes will become available so you can visit on your next trip to DC. 

The cookbook written by the minds and chefs behind Sweet Home Cafe is mostly a straight forward cookbook, but there are a few sections that provide historical and cultural context for some of the recipes featured within its pages. One of the biggest historical call outs it gives is to the history of the watermelon in the Black community, shedding light on how the fruit has been weaponized against Black Americans, but also how it's been reclaimed and reinterpreted. 

Watermelons were important sources of nutrients and water for enslaved people working on plantations in the south. The flesh of the fruit is almost all water, and helped people working in the fields to stay hydrated in the sweltering summer heat. After the Civil War, many newly free Black families decided to start raising and selling their own watermelons to great success, elevating the fruit to be a symbol of their freedom. 

White Southerners immediately identified these watermelon vendors as a threat to their own businesses and the racial order they firmly believed had been disrupted by the end of slavery. They immediately moved to tie the fruit to stereotypical depictions of African Americans as lazy or childish. Watermelons are featured prominently in racist caricatures of African Americans throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and even President Obama had to deal with people using the watermelon as a way to mock him for his race. 

Sweet Home Cafe presents this history as a way to unpack how something as innocent as a fruit can be used as a symbol of racism, but also to call attention to its original history and connections to Black families building a business a the end of the Civil War. It's really tragic how something that was causing good for many African Americans was twisted against them, and its original history is something many people have forgotten or never knew. Today, the stereotype is still familiar to many Americans, but we don't really understand why or how it got to be that way, especially as the image has become less common in the modern period. 

By the 1960's, when Black Americans were fighting for equal treatment under the law, this racist imagery had mostly faded from popular culture, but Melody probably would have been at least passingly familiar with it, especially via her relatives who grew up in the South (although the imagery was featured throughout the United States and was not just contained to the South.) By the time her stories take place, watermelon once again started to enjoy a reputation of being a tasty, refreshing fruit rather than a symbol of hate.

This recipe was featured in the Sweet Home Cafe cookbook no doubt because the fruit is a staple of Southern (and more broadly American) summer time cuisine, regardless of race, and also to acknowledge its importance for newly free African Americans starting businesses during Reconstruction. Pairing it with the discussion of the racist trope encourages readers to think more critically about the food they're eating, something I really appreciate as a historian given how little even I knew about the history of the food we eat before I started this blog! 

Sweet Home Cafe's tomato watermelon salad is easy to make yourself. To begin, chop up 2 1/2 pounds of watermelon and 6 varied heirloom tomatoes. Our grocery stores only had baby heirlooms, so Jess meticulously cut them in half for me.


Meanwhile, I prepped the vinaigrette by whisking 1/2 of a cup of extra-virgin olive oil together with 1/3 of a cup of sherry vinegar, 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt, and freshly cracked black pepper to taste together in a bowl, along with a pinch of cayenne pepper. It makes a decent amount of dressing, but not an overwhelming amount, unlike some of the recipes I've made from the National Museum of the American Indian's cookbook from Cafe Mitsitam.


Add the watermelon to the bowl with your vinaigrette along with your tomatoes and 1/2 cup of sliced Vidalia onions.


Toss it, and add in 1/4 of a cup of coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley. Toss again, and adjust your seasonings if you feel like it needs it.


You're ready to eat!


I really liked the salad when it was fresh. The flavors mesh nicely together, although the differences in texture between the watermelon and the tomatoes definitely took some getting used to. Maybe it would have been less noticeable if we'd used large tomatoes instead of baby tomatoes! The salad was fresh and bright, and felt like it would go perfectly with an outdoor gathering or cookout. 

After letting it sit in the fridge for a while... the watermelon almost completely dissolved into soup! The cells totally broke down and flooded our storage bowl with liquid, which made for an interesting surprise when I pulled it out of the fridge to pack some leftovers for lunch. Because of this, I would definitely recommend making the salad right before you're ready to serve it, and to eat it quickly. Otherwise, I would recommend giving it a try without reservation. 

Food history isn't always fun or easy. Actually, food history is just as much about power, oppression, and misfortune as any other kind of history. It just also sometimes comes along with tasty meals or ingredients, some that are still popular, and some that have faded away with time. This is a salad Melody and her family might have enjoyed in the hot summer months, but it could have still carried painful memories, especially for her older relatives who were used to living in a society that popularized racist images in all forms of media. I hope this more serious post shed some light on how something as simple as a fruit can be twisted into something cruel, and how communities have tried to combat and correct those hateful images.

Many thanks to Jess for prepping this entire dish for me because I wasn't feeling well!

3 comments:

  1. I love heirloom tomatoes and watermelon but not together. I will put cheese or herbs with watermelon or tomatoes but I think the texture of both together would get me.

    It looks great!

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  2. Thanks for this recipe. And thanks for the history lesson surrounding it.

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  3. When I made watermelon curry and let the leftovers sit, it too turned to soup. I drank the stuff and called it watermelon gazpacho.

    ReplyDelete