Taking a ride through culinary history with Jessica B. Harris as your tour guide is never dull. In fact, there’s always an aha! moment when ingredients and the roads they’ve traveled and the hands that have cooked with them come together to reveal a story that’s more than just points on a journey. For many of us, the James Beard award–winning historian and Oak Bluffs summer resident has enriched our understanding of the foods and cultures of the African diaspora – while giving us delicious recipes to explore them too. It’s no surprise then, that her latest cookbook, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine, brings together a fresh historical perspective, personal stories and recipes to illustrate how American cooking developed from the forged cuisines of Indigenous peoples, Europeans and Africans.

In an excerpt from the introduction to the book (below), we pick up Jessica’s timeline in the mid-18th century.

And while Jessica showcases chefs and cooks from each cuisine throughout the book (including the Vineyard’s Juli Vanderhoop and her Beer-Battered Sugar Maple Leaves and Cranberry Syrup), she devotes a final chapter to her personal food journey, including recipes such as Deviled Eggs, Baked Ham, Chicken Croquettes, Summer Southern Succo-tash and Mom’s Fried Chicken.

Three is a Magic Number: Establishing the Braid

An excerpt from the introduction to Braided Heritage

“By the year 1776, the place that would become the United States of America was not just about Pilgrims and plantations, but was an increasingly rich mixture of Native Americans from large swaths of the Eastern seaboard, multiple European communities of different classes, and Africans from western and central parts of that continent eating foods as diverse as corn pone, okra soup, and bean pottage. And we begin to see those foods come together.

This then is the American braid. Acknowledging the existence of many hands and many cultures and many ways of growing, hunting, fishing, and foraging and cooking, serving, and eating of necessity, changes the picture of the formation of the American pot.

An oft-quoted proverb asserts that, until the lion speaks, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. That is indeed the case in modern times. Imagine world history if it were written by the vanquished, not the victors; the underlings, not the overlords. Or, if both were put together, then there might be an equity of experience.

In Braided Heritage, I have attempted to give diverse — it would be folly to claim ‘all’ — parts of the American braid a voice. In the beginning, I consulted histories and old texts to paint a picture of these foodways as they likely existed in the first decades and centuries after contact between the Native peoples, the Europeans, and the Africans. But in thinking of what recipes to include in this book, I kept coming back to the fact that the story of food is always personal; recipes that are ‘traditional’ are inevitably cooked differently in one family versus the next, and dishes evolve in these hands, from one generation to the next, or perhaps from one meal to the next. I have been a culinary historian for many decades, but I have been a person devoted to the pleasures of sharing conversation around the table for far longer.”

— Jessica B. Harris 

Excerpt reprinted with permission from Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine by Jessica B. Harris, copyright © 2025. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Photography copyright: Kelly Marshall © 2025