## Introduction  
Many of the celebrated foodways of the Americas came from former plantation societies. Hoppin' John, gumbo and jambalaya are as emblematic of the Southern United States as are the bean fritters and palm-oil-flavoured dishes of Bahia, Brazil, the pepperpot stews of the Caribbean, and the salt fish and ackee of Jamaica. Each of these dishes is representative of a broader cooking tradition that combines foods of both the New and Old Worlds in syncretic culinary assemblages. But what gives these cuisines a distinctive signature is their African ingredients. The aromas of okra, blackeye peas, palm oil, ackee and bitter greens - all African foods - in soups and stews invites the question as to how these dietary staples took their place in American cuisines and came to define plantation foodways. To answer it, we must consider not only the commodities that enslaved Africans grew for market - sugar, cotton, indigo, rice and other cash crops - but also the foods that they planted for their own sustenance.  
Much of the scholarship on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade is focused on the commodities that shaped the New World: enslaved Africans and the export crops that they produced. Far less attention is paid to the food regimes that supported this enveloping economic system. A new focus on subsistence casts light on the foods that provisioned slave ships and the dietary staples that enslaved  
labourers grew for their own needs. Subsistence is a portal into the origins of African foods in New World plantation societies, the sites where they were first encountered and the role of Old World tropical food staples in Atlantic history.