A Taste for Snow Eggs

In February 2021, the culinary team at Hatchet Hall in Los Angeles curated a historic meal that repeated, reiterated, and reimagined a menu for the Hemings & Hercules Dinner Series. Chef Martin Draluck created a menu that honored the partial histories and archival silences of the culinary legacies of James Hemings and Hercules Posey. Culminating with the only remaining recipe from Hemings, the menu placed his dessert of Snow Eggs in proximity to head cheese, black-eyed pea fritters, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese to blur the line between a distinct dominant or subaltern American cuisine in the present. While dominant histories present Thomas Jefferson as a defining curator of American taste, the Hemings and Hercules meal situates Black culinary aesthetics as central to the development of American taste. The edible reenactment goes beyond fidelity to the past but rather proposes new approaches to tasting history. Performance studies is uniquely situated to address these overlapping temporalities, spaces, and knowledges – the form of the dinner makes sense of a violent and incomplete culinary history. This chapter examines reenactment performance with attention to food studies as a companion field for performance. Through a close reading of Snow Eggs, within the dinner and within the archive, the chapter offers a blended methodological approach to dinner experiences as a mix of material and metaphor, a trans-temporal engagement with culinary legacies. In reaction to Rebecca Schneider’s foundational conception of reenactment and remains and Michelle Liu Carriger’s analysis of Historical Reality Television, the chapter works from performance studies’ tenuous relationship with new materialism to deeply and sensorily entangle feminist science and technology studies, particularly Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges, with the emerging subfield of food and performance. As Lauren Klein has argued in An Archive of Taste , approaching histories of enslavement requires reforging a relationship with the archive, including its violent extractive nature – to methodologically sense new ways of uncovering figures such as James Hemings, who have shaped American tastes broadly. Draluck’s work has continued in a recurring series, The Black Pot Supper Club, marking a form of story-driven dining experiences in contemporary culinary events.