The Lunch Counter and Its History

The American lunch counter belongs to the history of Black American food as much as to the history of the diner, and Jessica B. Harris, in High on the Hog, places the cooks and the servers who worked the public eating house of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inside the longer story of African American cooking. Its anchor is the city and the railway town, where a person away from home needed a meal at a fixed price and in a short time. Its best-known chapter is the civil rights movement in the Southern states, when the stools of the department-store and drugstore counters became the place where segregation was refused.

A counter is a plain arrangement: a long surface, a row of stools, a cook working within sight of the customer, and a short list of dishes made again and again. That arrangement made speed and economy the first virtues of the kitchen, and it set the cook and the diner face to face, so that the food was judged at once. Harris reminds the reader that the labour behind such rooms, in the kitchen and at the pass, was very often Black labour, and that the dishes of the Southern table reached the public counter through those hands. The counter also carried a rule of access. In much of the South, Black customers could be served at the back or at a window, or not at all, while the same food was cooked by Black cooks for white customers seated at the stools. The injustice lay in the seating, not in the recipe, and it explains why the counter, rather than the dining room of a grand hotel, became the stage on which the question was put in public. The sit-ins of 1960, which began at a Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, turned an ordinary object of the street into a place of political record. What was ordered at such counters was the everyday cooking of the region: eggs and grits at breakfast, fried chicken, greens, cornbread and a plate of the day at noon, pie and coffee to close. The menu was the table of the household moved into a commercial room, and its discipline was consistency, the same plate in the same hand at the same price. A senior cook would say the counter teaches repetition, and that a dish served a hundred times in a morning has no room to hide a fault. To read the lunch counter well is to read two histories at once: a history of method, the short order and the fixed menu, and a history of who was permitted to sit and who was permitted to cook. Harris keeps both in view, and the food of the American public table cannot be separated from the people who made it or from the terms on which it was sold.

The taste of the counter is the taste of plain Southern and northern working cooking: bacon and eggs, grits, fried chicken, greens, cornbread, soups, pie and strong coffee. Each is cooked quickly and seasoned firmly, since the plate must satisfy at once and be the same on Tuesday as on Saturday.