“I knew I was gonna do a series on recipes that we weren’t making anymore,” Sonja Norwood, the content creator behind Wick’d Confections, tells TODAY.com from her home in Texas. She’s making sure that once-ubiquitous Black American foods get their chance in the spotlight again.
It was around Thanksgiving when she got the idea for the series, she says.
“I don’t remember what I was doing, but I saw a video, it was on vinegar pie,” she adds. “And I was like, ‘What is this?’ And I heard it was a Black recipe, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna make this for Black History Month.’”
All month long, Norwood has been highlighting foods significant to the Black community that have been lost to time, like vinegar pie, which she says was also known as a “desperation pie” because of its association with the Great Depression.
“This pie was born out of necessity when fruit or citrus lemons were hard to come by,” Norwood says in her video, which has millions of views, adding that it was likely invented by Black families much earlier than the Great Depression. “It doesn’t taste the way you think a vinegar pie would taste. The acidity cuts through the sweetness and mimics lemon pie.”
Black American history is inextricably linked to food, as its start, the American slave trade, is also the very origin of soul food. Stories have been told for centuries about women on slave ships who braided rice and okra seeds in their hair, sailing toward the land we stand on now.
Norwood cooks every dish she speaks about on-camera, dressed to the nines and spouting history as she re-creates it. She tries her bakes at the end of every clip and is honest if it was lost to time because of its taste.
Some commenters accuse her of being AI-generated because of her semi-monotone speaking style in her videos, which she calls her “formal voice.” She reflects on this in the casual voice she uses every day.
“A lot of people, especially when you are on social media, they look at us as one thing, as one-dimensional, and I’m not that, right?” Norwood says. “I code-switch several times within a video and people who are Black, they understand. They know what I’m doing.”
She initially planned to do only a few recipes, but the response has been so outstanding that she has increased her research and output. She says she is trawling the internet and even just asking family and friends what their elders used to feed them.
“Now, the response that I got was crazy,” Norwood says. “I wasn’t expecting to do so many. I’m doing one every day now.”
She offers more than one sweet potato recipe — for example, sweet potato slump and sweet potato butter — and Norwood says that’s because the tuber served as the West African yam’s understudy.
Enslaved men and women no longer had access to the yam and sweet potatoes were the next best thing. Black folk could grow them in the small plots their enslavers allotted them. While the love of the sweet potato lives in our Thanksgiving pies, the ancestors used it for much more.
Other gems include burnt sugar cake (the mother of the Black South’s quintessential caramel cake), hoecakes, sugar-boiled custard, banana croquettes and molasses pull candy, which was left in the pews and rec rooms of Black churches in the early 20th century.
“If you haven’t heard of this before, that’s not surprising. This isn’t bakery candy,” Norwood says. “This is porch and kitchen candy, before mass-produced sweets.”
She explains in her video that molasses appears so often in Black American food because it was given to ancestors as a byproduct of the sugar-refining process.
Enslaved people fermented it to imbibe and later discovered it could be further distilled into rum. Then, Black cooks like Lucretia Brown used the pantry staple as the star ingredient of the Joe Frogger molasses cookie, which she is credited for inventing.
Meanwhile, Norwood’s followers have been trading memories in her comments sections.
“I’m the only boy in my family that my Nana taught this to. 100% intuitive and ALLLLLL from memory,” one Instagram user wrote under her molasses candy video. “She’d say, ‘Boy, you’re the only other person I know who can feel the candy when it’s done.’ Thanks for reminding of this happy memory.”
Those enslaved women who landed in America planted seeds — the okra and rice seeds braided into their hair, as well as the seeds of agricultural and culinary knowledge they carried in their minds.
Norwood thinks we have a duty to keep that knowledge accessible, with cornrows on our heads, as they had on those ships.
“The ‘why’ is very meaningful to me, because we go through the day and do certain things, and we don’t know why we’re doing it,” Norwood says. “They did the best with what they had, and they made it. It humanizes our ancestors, people we’ve never met before. Maybe we have some cognitive dissonance with that situation, but this gives them some humanity.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
