Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine

Dr. Jessica B. Harris, a James Beard Cookbook Hall of Famer and star of the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog, has built her career studying how culinary traditions developed across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. Here she combines historical analysis with recipes gathered from friends whose family cooking reaches back generations.

Harris examines the foundational period when Native peoples, European settlers, and enslaved Africans first encountered each other, creating the conditions for entirely new dishes to emerge. The recipes demonstrate how ingredients and techniques from three continents merged in unexpected ways:

• Beer-battered sugar maple leaves with cranberry sauce combines indigenous ingredients (maple and cranberry) with European wheat and beer

• Lard-based pan de polvo, cinnamon shortbread cookies, connects the pigs brought by Spanish settlers with the late fall hog slaughter that made lard available for Christmas treats

• Oven-baked yams recall those that enslaved Africans brought to the New World and would roast in the embers of their fireplaces

Harris shows how American cooking traditions developed through constant adaptation—shaped by geography, migration patterns, and the creative blending of diverse culinary knowledge from three continents.

This is both culinary history and working cookbook, offering recipes that range from everyday meals to festive spreads.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.