25 Forgotten Foods Served at Every Black Memorial Day Cookout in the 1960s South

#History #Food
The smell of charcoal smoke before sunrise. The sound of the Igloo cooler being dragged out of the basement. The foil-wrapped pound cake sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting for the oldest person at the cookout to take it home at the end of the day.

If you grew up Black in the 1960s South, you remember Memorial Day. Not the parades. Not the flags downtown. The cookout. The one your grandmother started preparing for two days before. The one where Aunt Ruth brought the potato salad and Uncle Curtis guarded the grill like it was a military post. The one where, somewhere on the corner of the table, a plate sat untouched all day for the men who didn't come back from the wars.

We're going to talk about the dishes nobody serves at modern cookouts — souse on Ritz crackers, pickled pig's feet passed around in a jar, hot German potato salad that came home with the GIs after the war, watermelon rind preserves on white bread, sweet potato pone instead of pie, hand-cranked peach ice cream the kids took turns on.
And we're going to talk about the plate that nobody touched. The one set aside for the Black veterans of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam who came home to a country that didn't know how to honor them — so we honored them ourselves, at the cookout, on the corner of the table, every Memorial Day.

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By https://www.youtube.com/@Tomstimemachineyoutube