The Multicultural Grandmother

“I started thinking about my family history when I started having children of my own,” says Leni Sorensen, Ph.D., African-American Research Historian at Monticello in Charlottesville, Va. The child of a mixed-race couple, Sorensen, who is now 65 years old, has a complicated and very American family story. She quickly realized that cooking heirloom recipes with her children was the easiest way to expose them to their heritage.

This work became the basis of Sorensen’s career — for more than twenty years, she has taught 18th century history by demonstrating its fireplace cookery in Southern museums. It is also the way she shares family history with her four grandchildren.

Sorensen’s mother came from a staunch Lutheran family in Southern California. Her father was from a black family whose ancestors had moved to Northern California not long after the Civil War. In the 1930s when the couple married, lynching was still occurring and they were forced to travel to Mexico to legally marry. Nevertheless, race was seldom discussed in their home. Her parents were radicals and the burning issue of their day was Nazi atrocity.

“I wasn’t raised black or white,” says Dr. Sorensen. “I was raised middle-class, Unitarian, Jewish-sympathizing, left-wing intelligentsia with a pinch of Seventh Day Adventist thrown in.”

She was also raised a latch key kid. Having divorced her father, Sorensen’s mother quickly remarried and both she and her second husband were far more interested in changing the world than they were in fixing dinner. Dr. Sorensen rose to the task when she was 9 years old.

Her paternal grandmother, “Grandma Maud,” and her stepfather, “Daddy Robert,” shared their family recipes. And that was her introduction to the connection between food and culture, food and geography, and food and class. Cornbread, specifically, told the tale.

Her teachers, she says, were very different people. Daddy Robert was born in Algiers, La., in 1914 and Grandma Maude was born in Boligee, Ala., in 1889.

“Contrary to the rule for many of the other Southerners I’ve met, however, both of them insisted on yellow cornmeal for their cornbread, which they also called 'pone.' Daddy Robert used to say: 'Only po’ buckra eat white meal.' At the time, I had not a clue to what exactly ‘po’ buckra’ might be. I intuited that they were some sort of white people for whom one should feel sorry,” says Dr. Sorensen, adding: “My grandmother was not interested in explaining anything other than matters pertaining to God and the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Her single culinary admonition was that the cornmeal had to ‘marry’ with the hot water by sitting for a half hour and one could judge the proper consistency of the batter when a pone formed in the hand held the imprint of one’s fingers. The pone was then ready for the sizzling grease in the pan."

“I still have the nine-inch cast-iron skillet Daddy Robert passed on to me in 1953. I use it for all sorts of cooking but especially for cornbread. Two of my four children are good cooks, and they’ve learned cornbread from cornbread. So far, they’re less interested in making pone than they are in eating the pone I make.

“But the grandchildren! Ah, that is a different story. In addition to the holidays, each one spends a weekend alone with Grandma and Grandpa in Charlottesville every year. They are as excited to make the family cornbread as they are to hear stories about their parents as children.

“Making cornbread is making memories. I can be teaching students at the University of Virginia about the material culture of slavery or teaching my grandchildren, but whenever I make pone and make that fingerprint in the batter, I remember Grandma Maude.”