We talk to two of the chefs featured on the hit Netflix show. They re reimagining traditional dishes a boon for local diners and local farmers as well.
“The story of food is also the story of who we are,” proclaims host Steven Satterfield in Netflix’s High On The Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. The new docuseries, which came out just this week, sets out to reveal the origin stories of what we know as “American” cuisine. But this time the focus is on the people whose contributions have often been overshadowed or erased from the collective memory of American history African.
This is just the first of many feasts for Satterfield in his journey to understand and illuminate Black American traditions as the host of new Netflix show, High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, a documentary series about African American food and the lost history of survival, lives lived and worlds forged through fire. Conceived by producers Fabienne Toback and Karis Jagger, the series was adapted from Harrisâs book of the same name.
âWith the death of Michael Brown and Ferguson [protests], we wanted to really sink our teeth into something a little bit deeper. That [event] weighed heavily on us,â Toback told the Guardian. The book by Harris was given to her by a friend who predicted the book would change her life. It did. âI read it and wept. Karis [Jagger] read it and wept. It was kind of like a no-brainer that this was our next project,â the executive producer said. In the book, the pair found kernels of black food history los