Foundation of a Plantation Kitchen

This foundation is from a separate kitchen building. Here, enslaved cooks prepared meals for the Bennehan family. Enslaved servants carried food from here to the main house to be served. While enslaved cooks prepared elaborate meals here, most enslaved families survived on rations of cornmeal and salted pork. They fished, hunted, and foraged to add to their diet.

Morgan Latta remembered how food was scarce during his childhood years in slavery: “I was but a small boy, and did not wear but one garment, and that was a shirt. I had to remain at home, while my mother would go to the field, until it was time for her to come home and nurse the baby. I remember when she returned, about ten or eleven o'clock, to get dinner, she would find us all crying for bread; she would come in and nurse the baby and give us all a piece of dry corn bread. I would enjoy it as if it were a piece of cake… I remember when I had to boil peas for my master's cows, and when I did not get enough to eat I ate about as many peas as the cows ate, and instead of the cows getting fat, I got fat.”

Morgan remember that patrollers could search their houses for signs of resistance: “I remember when the patrollers would come around and examine the little children, and make them tell if there was any flour or sugar or spirits in the house, and if they found any in the house, they would take the head man of the house out and whip him.”

Alcohol or sugar was a signal that someone had managed to secretly barter with neighbors for extra food. Patrollers harshly punished this bartering as an act of resistance. Controlling food was one way to limit an enslaved family’s ability to trade, travel, or seek freedom. 

Image: Interior of an original plantation kitchen, at Somerset State Historic Site.

Photo credit: G. Wayne Rhodes, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0.