🧀 Do Your Kids Love Mac & Cheese? They Have James Hemings to Thank! 🥔

What we learned this month about how Black foodways shaped American cuisine.

Small Bites:

📖 Buy the quintessential Southern food cookbook by Edna Lewis: The Taste of Country Cooking on Bookshop.org

🍴 Shop delicious food from award-winning African-American Chefs for Black History Month from Goldbelly - ships Nationwide!

👨‍🍳 Purchase the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse so your kids can learn how to cook and not simply follow a recipe - give them the life skills to not only survive, but thrive!

🧀 Make some One Potato Cheese Sauce for your homemade mac and cheese!

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - paid subscribers have access to the full archive of Recipes and Specials Interviews and Community Voices for $5/month or $45/year.

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We've had some amazing interviews with guest chefs this month, and if you haven't had a chance to read (or listen!) to them yet, now's the perfect time to dive in! Black foodways have deeply shaped American cuisine, and food is a wonderful way to educate and interact with our kids when teaching them about Black History Month.

Check out this trailer for Finding Edna Lewis that’s now available to watch on PBS! And of course, read our interview with host and food historian Deb Freeman.

How Black Foodways Shaped American Cuisine

At One Potato, we love sharing stories from our community about your family memories surrounding food & cooking, and the passing down of recipes - that’s part of our Community Voices series, and part of our Order Up! Interviews. This month, we loved hearing how Deb Freeman remembers sprinting home from school just to see what her grandmother had made—maybe chicken and dumplings, maybe collard greens, always something special. For Chef Liesha, food was a way of life; she watched her parents cook daily, her dad playfully mimicking TV chefs as he stirred pots. Chef Cassandra was always her mom’s little helper in the kitchen, craving the time they got to spend together. These moments weren’t just about getting food on the table—they were about family, community, tradition, and love. And when we talk about American cuisine, we can’t tell that story without Black foodways—the contributions from African-American homecooks and chefs—the techniques, flavors, and innovations that have shaped the way we eat today.

—>Behind the Paywall: The foundation of American cuisine, the legacy of James Hemings, honoring the legacy of African American chefs like Edna Lewis, and joining the conversation…