Our Second Freedom Day
Today is Juneteenth in the United States, a new federal holiday
I found this stone by the railroad tracks in June 2020, a week or two after the Black Lives Matter rallies and marches. I use it as a paperweight, and a reminder of the summer when we were all masked, but gathering anyway across the country. Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021, and because this is not familiar yet, especially to those of you outside the US, I'm sharing its history with an essay by Heather Cox Richardson, linked below. (Indeed, in only a couple of weeks we’ll also celebrate July 4th, Independence Day.)
I also want to recommend a podcast about how racial issues in the US are not the same - not at all the same - as those in other countries. This has apparently been a controversial viewpoint in Britain, but the facts are clear. “The overwhelming majority of black Americans can trace their ancestry to enslaved Africans who were transported to the new world between the 17th and the 19th centuries. Whereas in the UK as of today, the overwhelming majority of black British people are either immigrants from Africa or the children of immigrants from Africa.” This is important for Americans to contemplate: our exceptionalism is painfully apparent.
But on a more uplifting note, a few words about what to eat on Juneteenth, if you're in the US and enjoying this extra day off. For me holidays are all about what to cook and I was puzzled about Juneteenth, until I realized that I already had the cookbook on my shelves: The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis, published in 1997 and full of stories from her hometown, Freetown, Virginia. I think everyone who loves good food should have this book.
Celebratory foods today are basically what we think of as Southern cooking, including a curious dessert called Red Velvet Cake. This is a chocolate cake colored red, with the kind of liquid coloring I swore off many years ago. But it turns out that originally the red was a chemical reaction between natural cocoa and acid ingredients, and that you can use beet juice for coloring. Here’s a recipe from the Washington Post, shared using a subscriber gift link (why on earth don’t UK papers use these?): “Subtly sweet, tender and tangy, this red velvet cake shines with or without food coloring.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson has become famous for her newsletter combining US history with modern events. She’s rather too partisan for me - sometimes I think she’s President Biden’s key publicist - but she is a delightful and accomplished storyteller with a deep knowledge of US history. Here’s her latest on Juneteenth, which actually started in 1866 as a celebration for Black Americans.
