Oxtail being celebrated with Central NJ's only Black history museum

These days, you can find oxtail — meat of the tail of beef, often braised or cooked in stews — celebrated on the menus of many Jamaican, Cuban, Caribbean and soul food restaurants in Central Jersey.

But for hundreds of years, oxtail was hardly served on a silver platter. Instead, the “low on the hog” meat was an unwanted cast-off, given to enslaved people and animals.

What those doing the casting-off didn't know is that, when cooked properly, oxtail is flavorful and delicious.

At 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26, locals who want to try oxtail can do so thanks to the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, Central New Jersey’s first and only Black history museum.

For the second time, the museum will host Oxtail Fest at Put’s Tavern, a feast and fundraiser at the Antique Barn at Cashel, a restored Hillsborough barn that will be restaged to become Put’s Tavern, the legendary 19th-century Black-owned establishment on Zion Road.

The $250 tickets and corporate sponsorships, available at ssaamuseum.org/tickets, will be used to fund the museum’s operations, research and programming. It also will launch its capital campaign to build a larger museum complex that will include a café, farmstead, exhibit space and education center.

Oxtail cooked two ways will be served at the festival: American/Caribbean fusion oxtail and a Cuban-style rabo encendido, which literally means “tail on fire” (although the spice will be mild for the event.)

SSAAM executive director Donnetta Johnson will cook the American/Caribbean fusion oxtail in a method that’s a combination of how she learned to cook the meat from her own mother in Alabama, and the way she learned from her Jamaican family. SSAAM board member Jackie Fay will cook the Cuban oxtail in a red sauce using her mother’s traditional Cuban recipe.

It was Johnson and Fay’s talk of their oxtail recipes that inspired the festival.

“We were sitting together in 2021 and talking about our oxtail recipes, and I said, ‘We should have a little oxtail competition where we both make our recipes, invite people over and just eat, celebrate our families and have some fun,” Johnson said. “When I took the position of SSAAM’s executive director, the idea just blossomed.

"We said, ‘We are going to cook this amazing food for people who want to support the museum and we’ll blow their minds.' ”

That they did. The inaugural festival last year was a hit, raising $87,000 for the museum.

This year, they hope to raise $90,000 at the fest, which will feature other African and Afro-Latin diaspora fare, such as okra, Jollof rice, cornbread, croquetas, empanadas, sweet potato pie, bread pudding and chicken (for those who don’t eat oxtail.)

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A signature drink — the Peach Diaspora — will also be served as a nod to those who worked in the Sourland Mountain peach orchards. The drink will include bourbon and peach schnapps. (Before 1900, half of the Garden State’s 4 million peach trees were in Hunterdon County.)

Put’s Tavern was a popular Rock Mill area bar during the early 1800s, known for its food, drink, and raucous and wild activity.

“The area was where poor whites, freed African Americans and Indigenous people lived together and had an integrated society for many years,” said Johnson. “The mountain was a rough terrain to live on, but these people worked together, lived together and survived.

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"It was a mixed-race community where people got along a lot better than people were in the larger American society, where people were segregated. ... Put’s Tavern was a place where the community came together.”

The Central Jersey community came together last year at the festival, Johnson said. SSAAM hopes to break ground on the larger museum complex in three to five years.

“Our mission is to tell the story of the African-American presence in the Sourlands and in Central New Jersey with the expectation that in knowing our history we will be able to deal with it as a unified community,” Johnson said. “We need to know our history in order to make a better day.”

Go: Sunday, Feb. 26, 3 p.m., Antique Barn At Cashel, 145 Wertsville Road, Hillsborough, $250; ssaamuseum.org/tickets.

Contact: JIntersimone@MyCentralJersey.com

Jenna Intersimone has been a staff member at the USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey since 2014, after becoming a blogger-turned-reporter following the creation of her award-winning travel blog. To get unlimited access to her stories about food, drink and fun, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum to host Oxtail Fest