The Art of Pepper Pot
An Amerindian tradition that allegedly won the American Revolutionary war, was commercialized by Campbell’s, and turned into art by Andy Warhol.
Photograph of Andy Warhol, a signed can of Campbell’s Pepper Pot, and Warhol’s screenprint.
Pepper pot, Guyana’s national dish is a thick stew originally created by Amerindians who discovered the preservative powers of cassareep found in cassava. Cassava which originally was found in the Amazon rain forest later to be brought by the Portuguese to West Africa. While pepper pot is definitely and Amerindian dish there are African derivatives found in other parts of the world like Philadelphia pepper pot. Through slavery cassava was brought to West Africa and then taken from West Africa to the United States similar to how many culinary elements were added to Guyanese cuisine. This is in part why the cuisine of Guyana is so diverse and varied due to the large influx of African, Indian, and Chinese ingredients. Throughout pepper pot’s journey it acquired quote the accolades from itself, most notably being the national dish of Guyana. On top of being Guyana’s national dish, pepper pot is said to have been the food that won the American Revolutionary war.
As the story goes, George Washington’s troops were on cold and on the brink of starvation at Valley Forge late in December of 1777. "Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place," he wrote, "this Army must inevitably ... Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can." That great change came in the form of a stew improvised by the baker general Christopher Ludwick using tripe, vegetable scraps and whatever spices he could find. This miracle stew in the United States later took on the name Philadelphia Pepper-Pot. While this story is completely false, the impact of this stew socially was immense. One documentation of this impact comes in the form of the painting Pepper-Pot: A Scene in the Philadelphia Market, that German born American John Lewis Krimmel painted in 1811.
John Lewis Krimmel, Pepper-Pot: A Scene in the Philadelphia Market, 1811 (125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. Leisenring, Jr., 2001. The Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
“John Lewis Krimmel immigrated to the United States only a year before composing this scene of the market stalls of Philadelphia. With its fascinating contrasts of race, social and economic class, age, and character, Pepper-Pot reveals the artist's delight in his new environment and captures Philadelphia's unique charms. This is the first oil painted by one of the earliest American genre painters and it is equally exceptional for its depiction of a freed person of color at work in the city. Placed at the center of this composition, the soup vendor, known through many early nineteenth-century accounts of Philadelphia, would bellow to passersby, ‘Pepper pot, smoking hot!’“ (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
In addition to Krimmel’s painting and the prevalence of pepper pot in Philadelphia and the US, the national food company Campbell’s even started to sell a canned version in 1899. Campbell’s continued to produce pepper pot until 2010 when it was discontinued due to changing consumer tastes. Campbell’s soup cans were monumentalized in th 1962 when artist Andy Warhol produced a series of screen prints of 10 of Campbell’s soups including the infamous pepper pot. Just as Campbell’s had commercialized pepper pot, so to did Warhol but in his own artistic way.
Andy Warhol, Pepper Pot, 1968. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
“In the Campbell’s soup can series, as elsewhere in mass culture, an “original” reproduction resulted in many other reproductions. Likewise, the screenprint technique—which removed any trace of the artist’s hand from the creative process—dovetailed with Warhol’s mass-produced subject. The artist’s own encounters with the homogeneity of postwar consumerism perhaps explain his particular attraction to the Campbell’s soup can. As he remarked, in typically laconic terms: ‘I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.’” (Whitney Museum of American Art)