Hall takes viewers on a global adventure to explore the unexpected roots of dishes that we think of as American.  She gives fascinating food history about the origins of ice cream, Al Pastor, Chicken Pot Pie, Barbeque, and the mis-named and wrongly appropriated “Nashville Hot Chicken.” Her research of these American favorites focuses on the people who created these, although they did not often get credit for its origins or their contribution.

Hall is from Nashville, knows the family who created the recipe for what is authentic Prince’s Hot Chicken. This episode emphasizes fact finding that even now, food recipes are stolen from Black people, robbing them of not only the credit as the innovator of new dishes but they also don’t receive the monetary reward. In following the trail of authentic hot, spicy chicken, Hall travels from Nashville to South Carolina to Ghana and reveals the African American erasure of one of the newest country’s fried favorites.

In episode five of the series, Hall interviews the great niece of the founder of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, Ms. Andre Prince Jeffries, in business for almost 100 years. She is still serving this dish in Nashville, Tennessee. The legend is that the founder, Thornton Prince, had a girlfriend that wanted to teach him a lesson for staying out late and so she added peppers, chillis and spices to fried chicken to burn his mouth.  Instead, he loved the chicken, and changed the recipe more, before opening a new restaurant, Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack.

We have so called “Nashville Hot Chicken” on almost every menu in Madison and across the US.  It originated and its birthplace is in Nashville. The Prince family, creators of hot chicken, received no credit from the food world, although they started the hot chicken craze.

Why acknowledgment is critically important to the Prince family, is because of the notoriety that it brings. The removal of their name, due to chefs who went through their garbage cans to steal the secret recipe, instead of legitimately paying for the use of the recipe. This is called Black erasure, i.e. too often the American way with people of color.  No one should ever call this dish, “Nashville Hot Chicken” ever again.

The recent Top Chef featured Wisconsin food and local chefs.  Their inclusion of African American chefs was only the late Carson Gulley, who cooked for years at UW-Madison.  He left because everyone he trained in his kitchen was promoted over him.  He also couldn’t find housing, due to segregated housing in Madison, so school officials built him an apartment in a dorm basement to keep him in Madison.

This was for a Black chef who had cooking shows on radio and television and who also wrote two cooking books on seasonings.  It was important to acknowledge Chef Gulley, but what about all the wonderful, talented Black chefs currently cooking marvelous, cultural meals all over Wisconsin?

One thing that Top Chef Wisconsin did right, was the episode on Indigenous chefs and Indigenous foods. In the episode, “The Good Land,” (Milwaukee translates as “the good land”) the contestants had to use Indigenous foods with no access to dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, pork, beef or chicken in pantries curated by Chefs Elena Terry and Sean Sherman.  These two chefs also treated the contestants and the judges to a feast with Indigenous dishes like white bean spread, smoked walleye, masa chips, wild rice patties with rosehip and mushrooms, roasted sweet potatoes, and dandelion greens, braised duck, and cedar-braised bison.

None of the contestants had eaten native food before, and there should have been more conversation about how colonialism affected the foods we eat and what cuisine is accepted.  The judging panel included two more Indigenous chefs: Chefs Jessica Walks First and Bryce Stevenson. These are all contemporary chefs and they and their cuisine deserved to be highlighted.  If you want another reason that it is important to authenticate food originators, after the Top Chef episode that included Uplands Cheese, their orders exploded and their recognition greatly increased.  Once again, Top Chef missed the opportunity to include chefs and cuisines from Black, Latin, and Asian food experts who have long been feeding all of Wisconsin well, and who should equally flourish within the high-end culinary world.