Where did the fried chicken/collard greens/watermelon stereotype come from?

Factual Questions
21

Collard greens are really nasty unless cooked right. Most white people I know that would server them would just boil them forever and then serve with a bit of vinegar like spinach. Icky. I have had them in soul food restaurants and liked them very much. I think this is part of the stereotype because many whites would not eat collard green, at least not with enthusiasm.

Fried Chicken has the benefit that it is portable, keeps well and is easy to eat without untensils and tastse good cold or at room temperature. It is a good journey food and a good picnic food and maybe it was more likely that whites would see blacks eating fried chicken. My Uncle used to drive a bus from St. Louis to Chicago and the majority of the passengers were black. And many of them brought homemade fried chicken to eat on the way. Sensible of them. Fried Chicken was not an unsophisticated food, you served it to the parson when he came over to Sunday dinner after all.

Watermelon too because it is a picnic food. Anything eaten outside the home is liable to become part of the stereotype. It is also messy and easy to depict. It is easy to look like a fool eating watermelon. I know I never cared though if it was good watermelon.

22

We often had CFS on the lunch menu at my high school in PA.

23

“It’s a good thing to do to a bad steak, but a bad thing to do to a good steak.”

–saying oft heard in Texas

24

Be sure to get you a Moon Pie & an RC for dessert…peanuts in your soda optional.

25

Personal observation: I worked at an ice cream parlor in South Carolina as an underaged worker. When white people came in, their orders were all over the map. When black people would come in, a significantly high percentage would order Butter Pecan flavored ice cream. I was not yet a full-fledged geek, so I did not take notes on actual numbers, but it was noticable.

26

Whatever may once have been true, chicken-fried steak and collard greens now appear frequently on the menu of some Northern cafeterias. Even forty years ago, watermelon was common in the North.

27

An earlier thread on this subject:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=28266

28

I worked at a bakery when I was 16 and had a similar experience. While orders from whites were all over the map, most (yes, over 50%) of blacks asked for “glazed donuts.” Unfortunately for them, we didn’t make donuts.

This was simply a factual observation. Will await the beating from the PC crowd…

29

I always figured that watermelon was a popular food among the poor in the south (of any race) because it’s sweet and easy to grow and doesn’t require cooking. If you want something sweet, are you going to bake a cake in August in Mississippi? Of course, if you have yourself a servant or slave to work in your kitchen, you can probably get them to suffer through the baking process, or the trouble of stirring ice cream, or the effort to make whatever sweet treat you want. But I’d expect that poor folk aren’t going to do that by choice, on their own time. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

On a side note, one week I went on a bus tour with 20 guidance counselors, taking them around Virginia to see the private colleges in the state. Every college wanted to impress them so they trotted out their nicest dishes. We ate a lot of fancy chicken breasts and green beans amandine and the like. But one of the HBCUs we visited decided to provide a good “soul food” buffet. God that food so damned good. It would’ve been tasty anyway, but after days of eating cafeteria versions of banquet food it was like manna from heaven.

My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

30

That’s very interesting, I’ve only ever heard garlic stereotypically associated with Italians. I’m Italian, and sure do my part to perpetuate that particular stereotype. I can’t get enough garlic.

It’s easy to see how garlic could be considered low class, what with the negative breath effects.

31

I suspected that the collard greens thing was because they grow wild and you can harvest them yourself. White folks likely wouldn’t eat them because they’re considered “weeds”, but slaves or poor sharecroppers likely thought of them as “salad”.

It has already been pointed out that watermelon is cheap, easy to grow, and sweet. No doubt slaves and poor sharecroppers thought watermelon was a fine treat. The white folks sure did.

Fried chicken used to be something of a luxury. Y’see, fried chicken (before modern fast food) used to be an expensive dinner in a restaurant, or a fairly large, messy undertaking in a kitchen, involving a considerable outlay of time, effort, and money (in the days before chickens were grown en masse in factory farms). For them what didn’t have much money, time, and so forth, fried chicken was very likely considered quite a feast.

I suspect at least part of the negative stereotypical effect came from watching slaves and poor sharecroppers get absolutely thrilled when someone gave them a watermelon, or a fried chicken dinner.

The white folks were thinking, “Geez, these negroes get all thrilled at the simplest things,” whereas the slaves were thinking, “Hot damn! Tonight, we feast! No white folks kickin’ me in the butt! This is great!”

Naturally, since white folks throughout Reconstruction and the early 20th century, up through the Civil Rights movement found it entertaining and useful to think of black folks as simpleminded and stereotypical, the stereotypes continued.

Weirdly enough, I live in an area that’s lousy with antique stores, and I have seen any number of old items possessing negative racial stereotypes (old ad signs with black washerwomen or pickaninnies eating watermelon, signs reading WHITES ONLY or FOR COLOREDS, that sort of thing)…

…and well-to-do black folks buy that stuff like crazy. Really insulting stuff, too. For purposes of home decor, as far as I can tell.

Go figure…

32

In which I provide a semi-interesting story but make no attempt at answering the OP.

My cousin is married to a black man from Alabama who was in the Navy for many years. A couple of years ago he was returning from an extended deployment and my cousin decided to make a special dinner for him. She spent most of the day on the telephone with his mother getting her recipe for fried chicken and collard greens, even going so far as to continuously describe the status of things over the phone while she was cooking. My wife and I went to the base to pick him up and informed him that his wife was making him an extra special dinner.

He was very excited.

We got back to their house and the timing was perfect. Everything was laid out, the house smelled great and my cousin’s husband was practically beside himself after having been surviving on Navy food for several months which, apparently, is far removed from real southern cooking. In any case, we sat down and my cousin began dishing everything out. The conversation went as follows:

Husband: That looks great. Where’s the cornbread?

Wife: Cornbread?

(can you see the train wreck coming?)

Husband: Yeah, cornbread. Everyone knows you can’t eat collard greens and fried chicken without cornbread.

At which point, my cousin bursts into tears while the rest of us attempt to stifle our laughter.

Once things calmed down, my cousin called her mother-in-law and demanded to know why she hadn’t said anything about making cornbread to go along with everything else. Her mother-in-law told her that she just assumed that my cousin was making cornbread as well. The mother-in-law’s exact quote (as repeated by my cousin):

“Who the hell can eat collard greens without cornbread?”

33

Could be, but I don’t eat them because I think they taste nasty. (Most fo the rest of my family likes them just fine.)

Now, turnip greens, on the other hand, yowza!

And re: cornbread: No sugar! (Or not much, anyway.) Sweet cornbread is an abomination.

Let the holy wars commence.
RR

34

I was out once with a group here in PA and chicken fried steak was on the menu - only they called it something else. I tried to explain that in other parts of the states it is referred to as “chicken fried steak.” No one could get this and they kept asking me: “Are you sure there’s chicken in here?” :smack: No matter how many times I explained the concept, they just did not seem to get it.

35

Khadaji: I shudder to think what they would have thought of a local food, Chester fried chicken.

:smack:

Rest of y’all: Stop it! You’re making me hungry and nostalgic. :smiley:

(Of course, the best way to make collard greens and spinach is to cook it with plenty of vinegar and bacon.)

Maybe this is a Midwestern thing more than a Southern thing, but why hasn’t anyone mentioned fried catfish yet? Perhaps the most important, most traditional Missouri meal is fried catfish, fried okra, collard greens, and cornbread. With plenty of Co-Cola to wash it down. :slight_smile:

36

Um… actually, speaking as a former short-order cook, what most Texans think of as “chicken fried steak” is, in fact, round steak which has been tenderized with a spiked mallet, breaded, and deep-fried.

I suspect fried catfish was quite popular with sharecroppers and slaves, too, but the slaves could jolly well go catch their own damn fish, and have a nice time doing it. Secondly, fish don’t exactly have “growing seasons” the way watermelons do. At least, not in the South. You could get fried catfish anytime, at minimal expense, assuming you lived near a river or lake…

37

Mmmmmmm . . . fried catfish . . .
On the other issue, I had never heard the term “chicken-fried steak” until about 15 ears ago. Until then, I had always heard it referred to as “country-fried steak.”
RR

38

To amplify Gigobuster’s reply(which may be the only reply to the OP, the minstrel show theory is probably correct. But minstrel shows go back a lot farther than the 1880’s.

Just to supply some factual info, I personally have owned a postcard which was produced around the 1910-1920 period. It features a smiling “Negro” next to a picture titled “their flag.” The flag was divided into quadrants with a slice of watermelon in one, fried chicken in another, etc.

The stereotype CERTAINLY goes back before the turn of the century.

39

It was also long part of the Japanese stereotype of Koreans. In one of Kenzaburo Oe’s books about growing up during the war, his main character (a child) worries that one of the neighbor’s will discover that his father eats “the Korean weed” and their family will be shunned by the entire village. Personally, I see it as a point in Korean cuisine’s favor.

40

Ever hear of chuck wagon steak? Isn’t that the same as chicken-fried steak and country fried steak? I don’t care what you call it. But I will order in nine times out of ten at a meat-n-three.