Why We Teach Black and Indigenous Culinary Heritage

Bill & Angi Kane, owners of Jolly's Mill Pond Farm in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Like a lot of people, the Black history we learned in school was thin. It was the same eight names every February, paired with a few bullet points about the horrors of slavery. It was flat, and honestly, it wasn't presented in a way that made you want to learn more. When I had questions beyond what I was taught, I went looking for the answers myself.

Years later, when Bill and I became owners of our property, we uncovered a piece of history we hadn't expected to find: an unknown Black history connected directly to Colonial Williamsburg and other parts of early Virginia. This wasn't the history of the wealthy few. It was the history of everyday, mostly anonymous people. We were hooked immediately.

From Tours to Food

That discovery led us to create our Black History tours. But tours alone weren't enough to sustain the property, and that need pushed us toward something new: teaching history through food.

Food has a way of connecting people that other subjects don't. When you learn about a dish, you end up learning about the culture and the people who made it possible. In Southern food especially, you can trace strong West African, African American, and Indigenous influences on nearly everything that lands on the plate.

We built classes around this idea. Our History of Barbecue and History of Johnny Cakes classes take authentic historic recipes — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and use them to introduce the people behind the food. A quick footnote here: authentic doesn't always mean delicious. But every recipe tells a story.

The Genius Behind Preservation

Our History of Bacon class digs into something people rarely stop to consider: how food was preserved before refrigeration existed. Understanding how to work with different types of meat, how to keep food safe and edible for long periods, took real expertise. Our ancestors built and passed down that knowledge without formal textbooks, and in many cases, that knowledge is what kept people healthy, safe, and alive.

Following the Plants

Digging into local food history naturally led us to local plants, and that opened up another direction for our work: learning how Black and Indigenous communities used native plants and trees medicinally.

One example is the sassafras tree. Native Americans used every part of it medicinally for thousands of years. When enslaved Africans arrived and when colonists settled the area, that knowledge was shared across communities. What's especially striking is that many of these plants have since been clinically proven effective for treating a range of ailments — knowledge that existed long before modern medicine caught up to it.

This is where our History of Virginian Teas class comes in, exploring the folk medicine traditions tied to the plants growing right around us.

Why We Don't Separate These Histories

What we've come to understand is just how connected Black and Indigenous communities have historically been in this region. Talking about one without the other would leave the story incomplete. My own emphasis leans toward Black culinary heritage — you can see it in some of the crops we grow, many of which connect back to West African heritage, with nods to other parts of the world as well.

But these explorations were never meant to stay in one lane. The food on our plates has been shaped by many groups, many of whom have historically been overlooked or marginalized. We see it as our responsibility to use every opportunity we can to recognize the wisdom of those communities, wisdom that too often went unacknowledged for generations.

That's the throughline connecting our Black History tours, our food history classes, and now our exploration of folk medicine through the History of Virginian Teas class.

What's Next

This post wraps up our audio introduction series. Starting next week, we'll be moving to video content on YouTube and across our social channels, so keep an eye out and consider following along.

August is Tea Month at Jolly's Mill Pond Farm. All month, we'll be sharing samples of foraged and wildcrafted teas, introducing new tea blends, digging into their history, and previewing some of our upcoming fall classes.