Many assume African-American cuisine consists solely of fried chicken, collards, and cornbread. These are indeed touchstones of Black food in America, but that assumption is limiting in more ways than one, most obviously because it too narrowly defines the diversity of what we bring to the table. African-American food is omnivorous and multinational. It encompasses the food of the formerly enslaved and the meals that were prepared by black, brown, and tan hands for those who enslaved them. It has taken foods from European culinary customs and the traditional ways of American Indians and adapted and inflected them with some of the tastes and techniques of the lost African motherlands.