Angela Davis at the table

In Black Southern families like Angela Davis's in Birmingham, Sunday dinner is not served as starter-main-dessert but as a large shared table ('the spread'): a long-simmered green, cornbread, a dish of peas or beans, a sweet potato treat, and sweet iced tea. Everything arrives more or less together; you help yourself and go back for seconds, and the cooking liquid from the greens ('pot likker') is as precious as the greens themselves. This cuisine, born of resourcefulness and transmission among women, carries a memory of dignity and community.

Two signatures of the Black South: 'pot likker,' that dark, smoky broth left at the bottom of the greens pot (sopped up with cornbread), and sorghum molasses, a local, affordable sweetener that replaced refined cane sugar in many working-class kitchens.