In one of the personal vignettes that punctuate “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America,” the food historian and cookbook author Jessica B. Harris takes a trip with her mother to Houmas House, near New Orleans. One of a string of former plantations along Louisiana’s River Road, the estate bears witness to a cruel history. Harris, who is black, speculates aloud that much of the place was built by slaves. The remark draws an unexpected response. “What artistry,” her mother says. “What beauty they created for people who thought we were nothing but goods, not even human beings!”

This observation runs like a golden thread through Harris’s lively if wayward account of how African slaves, thrust into a strange land, carried with them the taste memories, cooking techniques and agricultural practices of their homelands and transformed the way Americans ate.

In the South, slave tastes defined the cooking repertory in a wide arc that extended from the rice and seafood belt of the Carolinas to the Creole and Cajun lands of Louisiana. Elsewhere, blacks brought new flavors and dishes to white America in restaurants and markets, or on the sidewalk from food carts. As the United States expanded westward, they extended their reach, working as cooks on the chuck wagons that accompanied the great cattle drives and on the Pullman cars that carried passengers all the way to California and the Pacific Northwest. In the process, unsuspecting white Americans learned to appreciate African-derived spices and pungent flavors, to regard Southern dishes like gumbo and fried chicken and red beans and rice as part of the national heritage, to elevate macaroni and cheese to a place high in hipster heaven.

It’s a complex story, not easy to tell, and Harris often struggles with it. In her introduction, she shrugs off the burden of writing a definitive history of African-American food: “That copiously annotated, weighty opus has yet to appear and will be the work of another,” she writes in a rather disappointing abdication, given her credentials. Who better to take on this work than the author of “The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent,” “Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking” and “Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food From the Atlantic Rim”?