Stephen Satterfield Puts Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History

By Dorothy Wickenden

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.

Satterfield didn't realize the pairing's wider significance until he was getting ready for an episode of "High on the Hog," which refracts the history of the United States through the lens of Black food. Miller, who appears in the series, had an explanation: catfish and spaghetti originated in the Deep South in the late eighteen-hundreds, as Italian immigrants settled in Mississippi and Louisiana. Black Southerners adopted spaghetti, and came to consider it, like coleslaw or potato salad, a pleasing side dish to fried fish.

This is what Satterfield calls a good origin story: an unexpected confluence of historical streams. There are countless others. Peanuts, a key ingredient in West African stews, got their American nickname, goobers, from the Bantu word nguba. George Washington's Presidential kitchen was run by an enslaved man named Hercules, until he escaped servitude and vanished.

Such stories about the African diaspora's influences on American cuisine are disclosed in rich detail by Jessica B. Harris in the 2011 book "High on the Hog"—the basis for the show. Produced and directed almost entirely by African Americans, the series features Black chefs, pitmasters, historians, farmers, entrepreneurs, and cookbook writers discussing their heritages and creating delectable meals. Satterfield presides like an unusually solicitous reporter: he listens intently as his guests excavate buried histories and lends a hand as they cook.

At his parents’ house, Satterfield, a bearded, loose-limbed six feet five, had a sous-chef: his girlfriend, Gabriella Oviedo, a writer who also collaborates on his business. But, having spent his twenties training at high-end restaurants, he had things under control. Half a dozen family members milled hungrily around the living room, until Satterfield's father, Sam, returned from church. Familiar with his son's self-described "bougie tastes," Sam apparently expected a showy meal, but he was pleasantly surprised. "Stephen!" he exclaimed. "You made catfish and spaghetti!"

Harris sometimes cites an African proverb: "When the tale of the hunt is written by the lion, it will be a very different tale." With the series, Satterfield and his partners wanted to upend Americans’ view of their history. They knew how difficult it would be to do that in four episodes, beginning in the slave markets of West Africa and tracing centuries of suffering and transcendence in the United States. But Satterfield trusted in the seductive power of good cooking: "How do you get away with it if it's not about food?" In the second episode, "The Rice Kingdom," the culinary historian Michael Twitty prepares okra-and-crab soup at the Magnolia Plantation, outside Charleston. "Despite the fact that we were in Hell . . . that we were being worked to death," he said, "we created a cuisine." This food, he noted, was named for the soul—"something invisible that you could feel, like love and God."

"High on the Hog" débuted when many Americans were in an unusually reflective mood, after the George Floyd murder and a year into the pandemic. Justin Kirkland, in Esquire, called the series "revolutionary." In the Times, Osayi Endolyn wrote, "It hits the eye, mind and soul differently than any other food television program, because it simply does what so few have been willing to do: give Black people space to explore and express our own joy." The series, whose second season will be released this fall, is available in a hundred and ninety countries, with subtitles in Portuguese, Arabic, and twenty-nine other languages. Satterfield said, "It proved my thesis: food is the most efficient means of helping people to see themselves."

The city of Gary isn't much to look at these days. In its prime, it contained one of North America's biggest steel plants, the Gary Works, which employed tens of thousands of people. But half a century after white flight and deindustrialization, the formerly booming business district consists mostly of razed lots, boarded-up storefronts, and decrepit buildings. Satterfield describes Gary as "the literal embodiment of the deflation of a dream." So when he visited last year with his sister Ashley he was surprised to spot Bugsy's Tavern, a busy watering hole with a cheerful Bugs Bunny knockoff on the roof. "It defies explanation," he said—a white-owned biker bar near the old color line. "It's a neutral gathering zone, in a mostly Black city."

During my visit, we pulled into the parking lot of Bugsy's. Satterfield warned me, "There's a lot of smoking. You’ll want to wash your clothes afterward." A casually snappy dresser, he had arrived in cashmere trousers. "I’m going to do my change of wardrobe now," he said, and slipped on a cotton hoodie and quilted navy sweats.

Ashley, a bartender at Atlanta's old Colonnade restaurant, is Stephen's closest companion, and the family's self-appointed deflater of egos. (When I asked if Stephen did any cooking as a kid, she rolled her eyes and said, "He always burned things.") She is also the historian for an extensive clan. When she was a girl, she liked nothing better than listening to her elders’ stories.

Gary was established in 1906, by a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation; newspaper stories lured Black Southerners and European immigrants to the Magic City of Steel. When Sam was a child, in the fifties, Gary was known for its innovative schools, striking architecture, and rapid economic growth. It was also segregated, with an invisible barrier that Sam's siblings wouldn't cross. As a young man, Sam worked at the mill, as a switchman for railcars that moved giant vats of molten steel. Men lost limbs and suffered hideous burns, but employees earned what Sam called "crazy money," and many Satterfields thought of Gary as "the best place in the world." Sam knew that it couldn't last. One day, as he watched a ship being unloaded, he noticed crates marked "Product of China," and realized, "This is all collapsing." He embarked on a reverse migration, moving to Atlanta in 1976.

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Inside Bugsy's, the walls and ceiling were hung with Harley-Davidson paraphernalia, road signs, and posters advertising Bike Night and Ladies’ Night. Aging bikers sat around, absorbed in their cigarettes and longnecks. Most observed us with mild curiosity, but one bandy-legged man with lank gray hair ambled over unsteadily. Pointing to the jukebox, he said, "I played all these great songs." Then he informed us that he was an undercover agent for the C.I.A., and staggered off.

On a barstool, beer in hand, Stephen talked about Black Americans’ fraught relationship to land and food. For centuries, they had no way to own the farms they worked: "Cotton was for capital. We’re basically still there, in a slightly altered form—displacement and disenfranchisement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, redlining, gentrification."

Earlier, we had visited the ruins of the Satterfield homestead, bushwhacking through thorny weeds to the foundation of the house that Sam's father built. Ashley pointed to the place where their grandparents had tended a vegetable garden, which, along with squirrels and rabbits caught by Sam's uncles, helped feed their large family. At the bar, Stephen said, "Our dad grew up with a garden. Our mom grew up with a garden. Our grandparents grew their own food." In talks, he often mentions Black farmers who raise fresh produce in food deserts, "so that we can reclaim our health." Ashley interjected, "But a lot of people say, ‘I don't have to do that anymore.’ " Stephen nodded: "Our mom believed, ‘We’ve worked our asses off so that you don't have to toil in the field.’ "

When he and Ashley were little, they lived with their parents and their maternal grandmother in a split-level in Decatur, sharing the house with a series of foster children. Their mother, Deborah, and grandmother, Louise, were among a group of tough-minded, loving matriarchs known as the "Weaver women." Louise, a superb cook, ran the kitchen, with help from Sam, and prided herself on her layer cakes and peach cobblers. Stephen recalled, "Watching my dad and my granny in the kitchen together—it was magic." Extended family and friends were invited to Sunday dinners, and on holidays it wasn't uncommon to have thirty guests.

Louise died at fifty-nine, of complications from diabetes. "The family shattered," Stephen said. Later in his childhood, his older brother, Sam, Jr., succumbed to lupus. "I thought funerals were what people did."

In 1989, Deborah and Sam moved with the children to Stone Mountain, thirteen miles northeast of Atlanta. The town's namesake bears a two-hundred-foot-wide monument to the leaders of the Confederacy: a graven image of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on horseback, holding their hats over their hearts. Satterfield described Stone Mountain as "a place that perpetuated a new mythology for losers"—beginning in 1915, when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross atop the mountain before "The Birth of a Nation" premièred in Atlanta. At Fourth of July celebrations, Ashley recalled, men in uniform and women in hoopskirts waved Confederate flags. Stephen said, "It was normalized in our upbringing, living at the foot of this crazy white monument."

The town was diverse, though. Stephen talked about his elementary school as a "rainbow nation" of local children and immigrants from Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Russia. Deborah wanted her children to be comfortable with everyone, and to be proud of their heritage. She encouraged them to play with kids of all backgrounds, and used a marker to color their Christmas-tree angel brown. But, when they were finishing elementary school, "Deborah's ambition kicks in," Stephen said.

Deborah has a Ph.D. and works as a public-school principal. Still, she told me, "I wanted them to do better." She had Stephen and Ashley tested for admission to Westminster, in Atlanta's exclusive Buckhead neighborhood, a school that bills itself as "rooted in Christian values and wholesome intensity." When Deborah told the kids that they’d got in, they were inconsolable. "Everything I knew was over," Stephen said. But their mother insisted, "You all deserve to be around the best."

Westminster has a stone-gated entry, fastidiously tended athletic fields, and imposing brick and limestone buildings. The Satterfields’ classmates, identically dressed in polo shirts and khakis, were almost all white. Stephen began skipping classes. Taking his journal, a joint, and a tab of acid into the woods, he’d sit and write poetry. "I was ‘psychedelic boy’—miscast from the sixties," he said. "The other kids took Adderall and antidepressants."

During his freshman year, his English teacher offered an extra-credit assignment, which, Satterfield calculated, could "propel me to a high C." He turned in a poem called "Child of the Grass." After class, the teacher told him that he had talent, but needed to apply himself. "I don't know what you’re doing, but knock it off," she said. "You are a gifted writer." Satterfield came away with a different message: "my relationship to learning through my own inquiry."

Even then, he was keenly self-aware. "I knew I could charm kids into liking me," he said. "I was athletic, and a funny, popular stoner. I sometimes exploited it." He cultivated a wide circle of acquaintances, but spent most of his time with his friend Burch Shufeldt and Burch's girlfriend, Lauren. They passed the afternoons by getting high and watching the Food Network. Satterfield revered Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, but it was Julia Child on PBS—fluty-voiced, dish towel tucked into the waist of a frumpy dress—who ignited his romance with cooking: "I watched her make a cheese soufflé, plunging two spoons back to back into the middle, and a perfect steam rising up." He bought "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and meticulously followed her recipe for soufflé au fromage. "I’ll be damned," he said. "It came out perfectly. It was the first success I’d had."

The friends hung out at the Shufeldts’, in Ansley Park, which Burch describes as a neighborhood of "big-ass houses." Satterfield's time in Atlanta's wealthy precincts was sobering: "I thought, We’re so fucking broke. I felt bad for my parents. I’d never seen the spoils that money got." In the eighties, his father had lost his job at UPS after a back injury. Once he recovered, he worked odd jobs and managed restaurants. Burch's father was a banker at SunTrust. "The other kids’ dads were away on business, or were racist senators who didn't interact with us," Satterfield said. But the Shufeldts welcomed him. Before dinner, Mr. Shu, as Satterfield calls him, would disappear into his wine cellar and emerge with a bottle of good Bordeaux or Burgundy, which he encouraged the boys to enjoy. Satterfield vowed "to learn what Mr. Shu knew," he told me. "I wanted to speak that language. It's a kind of passport."

In Chicago, I met Satterfield for a late dinner at Obélix, a buzzy French restaurant that he wanted to try. Its industrial windows looked out onto a snow squall, but inside it was bright and warm, filled with the din of guests who had paid a small fortune for exquisite food. Satterfield ordered for us, assuring me, "Don't worry—if there's anything you don't want, I’ll eat it. I’m like a garbage disposal."

We had poisson cru, with a glass of Crozes-Hermitage Blanc for me and a Gimonnet champagne for him. There were grilled leeks vinaigrette, seared Hokkaido scallop with Okinawa sweet potato, green-curry velouté, squab in puff pastry. To accompany the squab, Satterfield ordered a glass of Pinot Noir. With minimal prodding, he explained the difference between the Pinot grapes of California and of Burgundy: "The profile of a Pinot Noir is so specific, both in terms of the potency of sunshine and what we call the ‘barnyard character’ of the grape varieties." He swirled his glass, closed his eyes, and inhaled. "It gives me the sensation and the memory of a basket of mushrooms that have just been picked from a really dank forest."

He talked about his trajectory: "I was kind of in limbo in high school, in between these cultures and communities. And what I adopted from the white people, I guess, was the sense of possibility." After a semester at the University of Oregon, Satterfield dropped out and enrolled in culinary school in Portland; Burch's parents co-signed his student loan. Living in a cheap apartment building that turned out to be full of heroin addicts, he supplemented his classes with "self-guided studies" in food and wine. He read every good book that he could find at Powell's, took classes at the International Sommelier Guild, and talked his way into simultaneous jobs at exclusive venues. At the four-star Benson Hotel, he started as a room-service coördinator in a basement workspace, then rose to sommelier, holding daily tastings in the foyer.

Still, he was an anomaly in the overwhelmingly white wine world. At one tasting, an elderly woman asked him, "Are you even allowed to be here?" As he began reading about apartheid and its legacies, he decided, "I didn't have the luxury not to think about it. I took terroir—food, culture, wine—and pivoted to the politics of the land." In 2008, with a grant from the South African trade department, he visited the wine country of the Western Cape. After talking to several dozen women who were unable to advance in the industry, he had a vision: "I wanted to build a nonprofit training center for Black winemakers."

He had no idea how to set up a business, but, he said, "I could just figure shit out." He approached a high-school friend whose father was an attorney, and the firm agreed to help with the paperwork. The timing was vexed: just as he started the project, he turned on CNN in his hotel room and learned that Lehman Brothers had crashed. He kept at it for two years, but the recession, along with industry regulations, proved insurmountable. Satterfield bounced back by moving to San Francisco and heading to one of the city's most popular gathering places: Nopa, a farm-to-table restaurant that emphasizes what it calls "honest food," well-curated wines, and "a diverse community of guests." Jeff Hanak, one of the owners, hired Satterfield as a sommelier. In his free time, he volunteered at a garden at Ida B. Wells High, a school for underprivileged kids. "Many of them had never seen anything come out of the ground," he told me. " ‘This is a radish,’ I would say."

Satterfield described Hanak as a "hard-ass from South San Francisco's blue-collar population," and as the best restaurateur he's ever met. Hanak showed him how to run an ecologically and socially conscious food business; he showed Hanak the emerging possibilities of social media. Satterfield started a blog, Nopalize, about local food culture, and when Instagram launched, in 2010, he immediately began posting. "O.K., cool," Hanak told him. "Play around with it." In the next five years, Nopalize grew to include a staff of correspondents, two filmmakers, a designer, a wine digest, and a podcast. "I was just hustling," Satterfield said. "I was leveraging access at the hottest restaurant to get people to work below their market value."

Finally, Hanak took Satterfield aside and pointed out that Nopa was paying his salary while he was effectively running his own business. Hanak asked what he really wanted to do. He replied, "I want to do exactly what I’ve been doing for Nopa—but, instead of covering Northern California, I want to cover the world." He had in mind a food-and-travel magazine, called Whetstone, that would center on "origin foraging"—stories about the unheralded people, places, and cultures behind every imaginable food. Nopa gave him five thousand dollars to have a logo designed. And then, he said, "they kicked me out of the restaurant."

One of Satterfield's favorite subjects in "High on the Hog" appears in the third episode: Thomas Downing, a free Black man from Virginia's Eastern Shore who began harvesting oysters in the Hudson in the eighteen-twenties and eventually became known as the Oyster King of New York. The owner of the damask-curtained, chandelier-hung Downing's Oyster House, at 5 Broad Street, he entertained bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and society women. In a basement where he stored fresh oysters, he and his son also hid fugitive slaves. He died a wealthy man, in 1866. For the show, Satterfield visited Bed-Stuy, where a young man named Ben Harney, continuing Downing's legacy, served oysters on the half shell from a cart called the Real MotherShuckers. Harney often had to convince Black first-timers that oysters are not élitist, telling them, "There's nothing that's not our thing." One customer was pleasantly surprised: "Tastes like outside, like the ocean."

Satterfield's encompassing tastes have been an advantage. When he started out, he said, "chefs were not really literate about wine, and somms were much less literate about food. So I was able to use my love of both to advance my career. My confidence, in a bizarre way, comes from being other, and from being comfortable with myself not being clearly of any of the worlds that raised me."

After reading David W. Blight's "Race and Reunion," an account of how white Americans betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, Satterfield concluded that Black history has always been regarded "either as dangerous or as not part of the American story." He aimed to help retrieve and shape those narratives, observing the maxim "Whoever tells the story owns it."

He worked tirelessly for three years to establish Whetstone. Two crowdfunding campaigns yielded barely four thousand dollars—enough to print two hundred copies. At first, his contributors wrote and photographed for free. People told him he was crazy. Gourmet had folded, Saveur was struggling, and David Chang's Lucky Peach was about to go bust after six years. There were no other Black American publishers of food magazines. The media, he said, was "designed to keep people like me out." Still, he was confident that readers would pay for a magazine that offered an alternative approach to food, as long as it was enticing enough. "Beauty is really powerful when you’re trying to persuade people," he said.

The difficulties of launching a magazine were compounded by agonizing personal losses. In 2017, Satterfield's podcasting buddy, Franklin Clary, died in a car accident. The next year, Debby Zygielbaum, his story editor, was driving through Napa Valley when a truck hit her car, killing her. Satterfield called Layla Schlack, an editor at Wine Enthusiast, and said, "I’m lost. I don't think I can continue this." She told him, "I got you, don't worry."

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The first issue of Whetstone included articles and photo-essays about the Marrakech medina, where the author sampled snails in a fragrant ras el hanout broth; a sustainable-farming workshop on the Mendocino coast; and an award-winning coffee farm in the mountains of Colombia. Satterfield sold the initial print run by hand. A friend of his told me, "He was always carrying around ten issues in his backpack, showing them to everyone he met." Satterfield made visits to wine shops and independent bookstores. "I got a satchel and went door to door," he said. Wherever he found a flicker of interest, he offered a subscription—"for four issues, even though we only had one."

In the spring of 2019, when Satterfield was thirty-five, he got a call from a filmmaker named Fabienne Toback. She explained that she and her creative partner, Karis Jagger, had bought the rights to Harris's "High on the Hog," and that Roger Ross Williams, an Oscar-winning documentarian, had agreed to join as a director and executive producer. The book had profoundly shaped Satterfield's approach to African American food history, and he thought that Toback wanted to talk about how to popularize Harris's ideas: "I’m, like, ‘Oh, yes, Fabienne, whatever you need me to do.’ " It took several conversations for him to grasp that she wanted him to be the host.

Satterfield didn't have the swagger of conventional celebrity chefs; instead, he brought humility and vulnerability. On one early shoot, the showrunner Shoshana Guy took him aside and said, "Hey, listen, I need you to stand up a little bit." But Toback and Jagger saw his inexperience as an asset. "He's a great listener, and well respected in the food world," Jagger said. "We wanted someone who had deep knowledge, sensitivity, and elegance."

In an episode called "Our Founding Chefs," one scene takes place in Thomas Jefferson's kitchen at Monticello. Satterfield holds a colander for the scholar Leni Sorensen while she drains a copper pot of macaroni boiled in milk and water. Sorensen, who got a Ph.D. in American studies when she was sixty-three, is cooking a dish associated with an enslaved man named James Hemings, whom Jefferson brought to Paris during his ambassadorial years and apprenticed to a series of exceptional chefs. After their return, Hemings made the food at Monticello famous. He used creamy sauces and exotic spices such as cloves, nutmeg, and allspice—and often prepared macaroni and cheese for Jefferson and his guests. When Hemings demanded his freedom, Jefferson insisted that he first train his younger brother, which took two years. Hemings moved to Baltimore, and declined an offer to cook for Jefferson in the White House. He drank heavily, and died at thirty-six.

"High on the Hog" was a daunting television project: conveying the searing hardships of the Black experience alongside the vicarious pleasures of travelling and eating. Jagger was wary of being didactic—of "coming down on the themes like a hammer." She and Toback marked every page of Harris's book with notes, then selected the stories that they thought were indispensable. Williams broke the narrative into four visually alluring episodes, opening with slavery and ending with emancipation—hoping, he said, that "this would guarantee another season." Even thoroughly culled, the material was too dense for the screen, Williams said: "I go into the editing room, there's so much information and talking. I strip it all out. The style of the show has to be slow, quiet, powerful."

The first episode, "Our Roots," begins with Harris, then seventy-one, shepherding Satterfield through the teeming Dantokpa Market in Cotonou, Benin. It is Satterfield's third trip to Africa, and sometimes she holds his hand. Picking up an enormous object, which she says looks like a "hairy elephant foot," she explains that it's an African yam—not to be confused with an American sweet potato.

The two make their way to the Door of No Return in Ouidah, formerly one of West Africa's busiest slave-trading ports, where Harris tells Satterfield about the horrors that took place there. After a long march from the interior, enslaved people were kept in holding pens, vulnerable to disease and starvation. Those who didn't survive were likely buried in mass graves. On the transatlantic crossing, prisoners were fed "slabber sauce": flour, palm oil, and pepper. "So much of that story is the gruesome details you just provided. But the latter half of that story," Satterfield says, "is the story of our resilience." Then he bursts into tears. Williams was crying, too—so intensely, he told me, that "Fabienne had her hand over my mouth, and I had mine over hers. The security guards broke down."

Through the series, Satterfield became an emotional proxy for people of color everywhere; many white Americans saw him as a reflective eyewitness to a past that they’d never grappled with. The food is a vehicle for remembrance, and occasionally for comic relief. He is served braised rabbit and wood-roasted carrots over grits at Hatchet Hall, in Los Angeles—an "ode to James Hemings," the chef says. Satterfield joins an al-fresco dinner of poulet-rouge hens and hickory-smoked-beet corn bread at a farm in North Carolina, whose owners expect that it will soon be seized under eminent domain. In Texas, he ventures out on a trail ride with Black cowboys, who razz him about being a novice. Satterfield, astride a docile filly named Liz, is uneasy but game: his long legs hanging low in the stirrups, he asks, "What do I tell Liz to get going?" That evening, he joins the cowboys around a campfire and smiles as he works through a bowlful of half-raw cow organs: an undercooked Son of a Gun Stew.

Satterfield has been in motion since he left home in his teens, and this May he made another move: to New York, where he and Oviedo had found a Brooklyn sublet. We had dinner one evening in Harlem, at BLVD Bistro, six blocks north of where Central Park West becomes Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The chef and owner, Carlos Swepson, greeted Satterfield warmly. Born in Natchez, Mississippi, Swepson moved with his parents to New Jersey as a child and started cooking under the tutelage of his mother and grandmother. He acquired the space for BLVD from another migrant: the celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, who was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden before opening a series of restaurants in New York.

Baskets of hot corn bread and biscuits soon appeared, followed by fried chicken, barbecued short ribs, potato salad, candied sweet potatoes, and smoked-turkey collards. Catfish was on the menu, but Swepson waved aside my question about spaghetti, saying that he’d had it back in Natchez but didn't serve it in his restaurant. Satterfield ate appreciatively, with one pedagogic aside: the short ribs, topped with barbecue sauce, were Texan, not Southeastern.

Swepson returned, to ask after our meals and to talk about how "High on the Hog" had moved him. "I feel like I know you," he told Satterfield, then said that he was writing a memoir, about his obstacle-strewn path to success. Satterfield gave him his phone number.

He is sometimes uneasy with his growing stardom in the food world. "I’m trying to use everything I’ve learned to put it back into the community," he told me. But the two businesses he knows best are troubled: restaurants were devastated by COVID-19, and legacy media is shrinking fast. Like his father taking the measure of Gary in the nineteen-seventies, Satterfield is thinking about how to adapt. His company, Whetstone Media, now includes a podcasting arm, Whetstone Radio Collective, and a culinary talent agency, Hone. He is also writing a book, "Black Terroir," to be published by HarperCollins. It starts in Georgia, where his mother's ancestors were enslaved on the Weaver cotton plantation, continues with his father's upbringing in Gary, and explores the "gastro-politics of place."

He admits that he's made some costly mistakes, expanding rapidly while spreading himself thin. Podcasting is not known for its lucrative returns, but last year he hired six new employees for Whetstone Radio. He said, "It was arrogant—to put it out and think that they’ll come." The company lost half a million dollars, and he had to let six people go. "I’m trying to find a balance," he said. "I’ve learned how to raise, make, and burn money."

Like other Black Americans familiar with the country's history, Satterfield knows that after every period of progress there is a retreat. "We remember the times of disruption—1865, 1964, 2020—because of what comes next," he said. "We’re now in a moment when we ask, Did we actually gain ground?" He doesn't expect the forthcoming coverage of the show to be quite so adulatory: "Black season is over." The Nigerian chef Tunde Wey made the same point to me. Wey is known in the U.S. for pop-up dining events at which he sparked conversations about income inequality by charging Black participants a fraction of what he asked whites to pay. He said, of Satterfield, "Having him be a host on a food show, an African American man, in itself was quite a victory." But, since the series was released, "the appetite, in print and on TV, for all things Black, for social justice—that shit has dried up." Wey mentioned a Malaysian British food writer and a Puerto Rican journalist in California who told him that they were again having trouble selling their stories. "That moment has quieted," the writer Osayi Endolyn said. "We’ve seen some people get hired. That's great. They’re where they’re supposed to be. But it becomes the justification for taking the foot off the gas."

In "The Big Sea," published in 1940, Langston Hughes wrote about the complexities of courting mass approval. In a chapter about the Harlem Renaissance, "When the Negro Was in Vogue," he noted that patrons flocked to the Cotton Club, but he never went, "because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites." In mixed clubs, "the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo." Satterfield's most prized books are first editions of Hughes's work, and he reveres the period of creativity that Hughes exemplified. (The new episodes of "High on the Hog" are inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, along with the Great Migration and the civil-rights movement.) Still, he is impatient with misplaced nostalgia: "Harlem is a brand name. People hold on to that period, in that ten-block radius, the way others hold on to a nonexistent past."

As Satterfield sees it, history is a cautionary guide to the future. He still keeps a journal, opening a fresh page each month for notes and poems. The entries for May include a plan for adapting Whetstone to the "new media environment." There is a broader goal, too—of using entrepreneurship to "help my people get more free." Thomas Downing proved that it could be done: at a time when most African Americans were enslaved, he forced his way into whites-only fine dining by making oysters glamorous. Still, Satterfield understands the hazards of the current era. "The forest is burning," he said. "Whether or not it's a controlled burn—bringing back the nutrients—or starting all over again is unclear." But, he said emphatically, "I don't like to lose." ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Satterfield's age and when he first travelled to Africa.