Mabel Hampton memorial mustard-horseradish roast

Today's slow cooker meal is dedicated to a fascinating gay black woman whose struggles serve as inspiration for generations to come. Be sure to read the short story of her life following the recipe.

A hearty beef roast slow cooked in a bracing mix of horseradish and stone ground mustard is just what the doctor ordered to fight off the in-climate weather. 

 

Ingredients:

1- 2-3 lbs beef roast

4 Garlic Cloves, minced

1 Onion, sliced

¼ Cup stone ground mustard

Olive Oil

2 Tbs. salt + 1 Tbs. Pepper

2 Tbs. Paprika +  2 Tbs. thyme

2 Tbs Worcestershire Sauce

3 Cups Low Sodium Beef Broth

¼ Cup horseradish sauce

5 oz sour cream

 Gravy (Optional) Following

 3 Tbs. Flour + 3 Tbs softened butter

Wipe out the slow cooker and spray, set on low heat.

Clean fat from roast, and pat dry with paper towels. Thin slice the onion, mince the garlic.

Heat oil in a large skillet. In a small bowl mix the salt, pepper, paprika and thyme. Rub roast with this.

Brown roast well on all sides.

Place roast in large slow cooker.

Mix garlic and stone ground mustard. Spread evenly over the roast and top with sliced onion.

Mix Worcestershire sauce into the beef broth and pour around the sides of the roast. Set your crock pot on low for 6 hours. Cover and let cook.

At the 6 hour mark, mix the horseradish with the sour cream and stir into the gravy in the pot.

Recover and cook for a final 1 hour.

This is a good time to fix the carrots!

When 7 hours are up, carefully lift out the roast and tent with foil. Allow it to rest while making gravy.

Mix 3 Tbs softened butter and 3 Tbs flour into a paste. Place 2 cups of broth from the crock pot in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir in the flour mix. Mix well, stirring constantly until gravy is thickened. About 3 minutes.

Serve with roast. Maybe a green vegetable along with the carrots.

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Honey Roasted Carrots

Ingredients:

• 8 carrots, peeled
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1/4 cup honey
• Salt + pepper

Directions:

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees F. Line with foil and spray a baking dish.

Peel and cut the carrots at an angle in 2 inch pieces.

Throw the carrots in a big bowl. Drizzle with olive oil. Mix until the carrots are completely covered with olive oil. Pour on the honey, then season to taste with salt and pepper; mix until evenly coated. Cover with foil.

Bake in the preheated oven until just tender, or cooked to your desired degree of doneness, 40 minutes to 1 hour.

If you are pressed for time, you can broiled them for 15 minutes instead of baking.

Variation: Instead of honey, try real maple syrup and butter instead of oil. Maybe a squeeze of lemon juice. 

 

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socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

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Mabel Hampton

An ordinary woman who's life and work serves as an inspiration to continuing generations of young gay black women everywhere.

Mabel Hampton was born in 1903 in North Carolina, and moved to New York City as an orphaned young girl. The uncle she had come to live with was abusive, and at the age of just eight years old, Mabel ran away.

Not knowing where to go, she took to the subway and ended up in New Jersey, where she was taken in and raised by a working-class black family.

Mabel turned seventeen in 1920, and soon returned to Harlem to find work. The Great Migration had spread black Southerners across the northern United States, and Harlem was becoming the center of black thought, literature, and arts. The Twenties were halcyon times and Mabel was right in the middle.

Mabel began her life on the stage as a dancer and singer with an all-black female ensemble on Coney Island. There, she met an older woman who introduced her to the word “lesbian.” Although she had fooled around with women before, this was the moment when Mabel realized there was a word for her desires, and for people like her. “I said to myself, well, if that’s what it is, I’m already in it!”. The two only had one night together. Of that night, all Mabel would say was, “she taught me quite a few things. I knew some of them, but she taught me the rest.”

In Harlem, Mabel performed at the Garden of Eden and the Lafayette Theater, and she spent her time with many prominent queer black women in the city: comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, entertainer Gladys Bentley, singer Ethel Waters (and her girlfriend, dancer Ethel Williams), and heiress and socialite A’Lelia Walker. “I had so many different girlfriends it wasn’t funny,” Mabel recalled many years later.

In 1924, Mabel and a friend were set up by the police and arrested as prostitutes. At the time, being an un-escorted woman at a bar was often considered enough evidence to be convicted of prostitution. Mabel was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Reformatory for Women for three years.
Shortly after leaving Bedford Hills, Mabel also decided to leave the stage. Performing was just one of the few jobs that were available to a young black woman with an eighth-grade education. Afterward, Mabel worked as a house cleaner.

In 1932, Mabel met the love of her life, Lillian Foster. The two lived together in the Bronx until Lillian’s death in 1978. They were always at the center of a large social group of gay women, and eventually donated their personal papers to the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). Mabel become an integral part of the LHA; without their pioneering work preserving the stories and artifacts of queer women, we would know little about her life.

In 1984, Mabel was invited to address the audience at the New York City Pride Parade and she spoke about her decades of experience as a black lesbian in America:
“I, Mabel Hampton, have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this country and all over the world, my gay people and my black people.”

For the last few years of her life, Mabel lived in the apartment that housed the first headquarters of the LHA. In 1989, she passed away after an extended battle with pneumonia. Her story, like so many others, needs to be remembered. It not only provides us with an account of early black lesbian life in New York City but also gives us a look at a fascinating woman would just would not give up!