ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY AMERICAN FLAVOR

A television host puts Black cuisine at the center of the nation’s history.

- DOROTHY WICKENDEN

Stephen Satterfield calls food an “efficient means of helping people to see themselves.”

Stephen Satterfield, the host of the Netflix food-history series “High on the Hog,” was bent over the stove in his parents’ kitchen, near Atlanta. It was one o’clock on a February afternoon, and he was preparing Sunday dinner for the family. Most of the meal was canonical Black Southern food: turnip greens simmered for hours, cheese grits, biscuits baked in a cast-iron skillet. The main course was catfish, coated in cornmeal and sizzling in avocado oil. The fish, though, had a widely disputed accompaniment. With a dimpled smile, Satterfield lifted a lid to reveal a pot full of spaghetti and tomato sauce.

Depending on whom you ask, this combination is either as congenial as shrimp and grits or as regrettable as a bad marriage. The food writer Adrian Miller once noted, “It may be the most controversial soul food coupling since someone decided it was a good idea to marinate dill pickles in Kool-Aid.” Satterfield, who is thirty-nine, first encountered the dish as a family tradition: in Mississippi, where his maternal grandmother was born, the river was full of catfish, and spaghetti was cheap. In 1946, she and his grandfather followed the Great Migration route north to Gary, Indiana. When Stephen was growing up, his father often fixed catfish and spaghetti for Sunday dinners and for church fish fries.