Americans typically commemorate the nation’s birthday with hot dogs and hamburgers.

Instead, I think we should mark the 250th anniversary of the United States with a hearty bowl of pepper pot stew.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, pepper pot stew was a popular street food. A dish of Afro-Caribbean origin, it was typically made with tripe and other cheap cuts of meat mixed with vegetables, hot peppers and other spices.

Enslaved Africans likely brought the dish to Philadelphia from the Caribbean in the 18th century, when the two regions were tightly connected through trade.

As a historian of women and labor in the early republic, I have learned how important impoverished and ordinary individuals were to the country’s founding. Cooking and preparing food, spinning and weaving cloth, washing and mending clothes, and caring for the sick were just some of the kinds of labor that supported the fledgling nation. Much of this work was carried out by marginalized women who are often overlooked in national commemorations.

One such woman I’ve researched represents both the possibilities and sharp limitations of freedom in that era. She was a pepper pot seller in Philadelphia known to us only as Dina.

Hiding in plain sight

Pennsylvania, like many northern states, responded to the Declaration of Independence’s rhetorical commitment to liberty by enacting a gradual emancipation law.

On the day the law went into effect in 1780, however, its provisions freed no one.

Children born to enslaved mothers........

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