Marcus Samuelsson's The Rise: Vibranium, Plated

   

Vibranium and its extract; 

ceremonial bowl from Peter's Pottery, Mound Bayou, MI.

Photograph c Lucey Bowen, 2020

    

        If you saw the Afro-futurist film Black Panther, you will recall the substance, Vibranium, formed from a meteorite. A powerful elixer is extracted from the purple-blue flowers that grow near Vibranium. 

    

    In my imagination, that elixer, applied to food, is Spice. Older science fiction fans may recall that in Frank Herbert's Dune, melange or "the Spice" is a a drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities, to which vibanium adds technical wizardry. 

    Although the book doesn't make this clear, the dishes created by Yewande Komolafe and Tamie Cook for the chefs honored in Marcus Samuelsson's The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food are meant to convey the style and personality of each chef, with a layer of Marcus Samuelsson sprinkled over. 

    Vibranium is already in our kitchens, in our spice drawers. You may not use spices the way Samuelsson does, but you know most of them, because they show up just about everywhere in the world's kitchens, and testify to thousands of years of exchanges, for flavor and for profit all around the world. 

 

    In my 7th grade Home Economics class, in my all-white suburban school, I chose Herbs and Spices for a research project. All those tins in my mother's kitchen cabinet bore the label McCormick Company of Baltimore. I wrote to McCormick. They sent me a brochure that told me something of each and where their spices were grown. I imagined a world map showing spices making a one-way trip to our local grocery store's shelves. My mother, like Samuelsson's grandmother, purchase them for use in preserving pickles and flavoring baked goods. 

        

    Many years of travel and education later, I know that spices have been journeying since ancient times, but seldom on non-stop routes. As on the Silk Road, they made short hauls, escorted by traders, then exchanged in markets for goods to make the return journey profitable.

    The stops were seaports, where the spices were gathered and traded along the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the islands and mainland of African to the west, to South East Asia, to China, the Philippines  Mexico to the East. Trans-shipped across the Isthmus of Panama, the next steps might entry into the web of trade between ports like Havana, New Orleans, New York, Boston, and across the Atlantic. 

    Creole Languages, at the time of my graduate work, were imagined as a part of the continuum born in the collisions and twisted convergences of different groups who met in the era of the early waves of global trade. In a paper I wrote and delivered to a Conference in St. Thomas, I wrote about Dutch Creole, whose last speakers lived in a cabin in the mountains above Cinnamon Bay National Park, given by Rockefeller to the United Sates. The Virgin Islands have been goverened by six different slave trading and colonizing powers, the last being the United States.

    In my 7th grade history class this was called triangular trade. What is really was: The Atlantic Slave Trade. In it, manufactured goods (beads, copper, cloth, hardware, guns and munitions) were shipped from Britain to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves to work on plantations in the Caribbean or America.  There the enslaved people were traded for sugar, molasses, rum and tobacco to ship back to North America and England. 

    The exchange of spices and foodstuffs across the Atlantic was a result of that trade. It is to honor the resilience of the descendents of those enslaved that Samuelsson brings us the dishes of The Rise.

     

 

Spices are to flavor as pigments to painters.

Image c Lucey Bowen, 2020

    I'm adventurous in my painting, cooking and eating, but I've an amateur's palate. Moreover, like Samuelsson, I grew up with a minimum of hot-spicey food, with spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger used primarily for desserts. So how to describe and evaluate the dishes in The Rise? I'm inspired by Chef Cassandra Loftlin, whose work on America's Test Kitchen testifies to the breadth of her knowledge and depth of skills. We share a background in Anthropology, but Cassandra has literally cooked her way around the world. 

    

    My taste analysis is personal, subjective. Proust's famous madelaine stands for a flavor that evoked specific memories. Can a person evoke a flavor, as Samuelsson and crew have attempted to express? Is there a common vocabulary of those flavors of personalities? Is there the equivalent of the Victorians' Language of Flowers, a flavor dictionary of emotional symbols? (See Nik Sharma's authoritative The Flavor Equation for one answer.) 

    Of the individuals honored by Samuelsson, I'm priviledged to know three in person and through their work; one each from Samuelsson's Remix, Migration and Legacy chapters. For the first group, I look for a match between the recipe and the person, as I know and care about them.

 

GRILLED SHORT RIBS IN PIRI PIRI MARINADE 

IN HONOR OF 

MICHAEL TWITTY

    I first heard of Michael Twitty on Facebook. He was completing his Southern Discomfort Tour, cooking in the kitchens across the South, where enslaved people toiled. I was fascinated by Michael's research. The Cooking Gene is grounded in anthropology, art history, biology and personal discoveries. In 2015, we were co-presenters at the last of Molly O'Neill's Long House Food Revivals, in the wilds of Upstate New York. 

Dwelling for enslaved at Stagville Plantation, North Carolina
Drawing c Lucey Bowen, 2019

  

    Last year I visited Stagville, where Michael cooked over an open fire, outdoors, and received the detailed reveal of his African ancestry. I agree with Samuelsson and crews' estimation that Michael is the coolest guy at the table, if by cool, what's meant is deep and complex.  I'm aware of the pain and what it costs him.

    Remembering Michael's day long preparations and outdoor kitchen at Stagville, grilling the mariated short rib seemed appropriate. The origins of the piri-piri marinade, in New World peppers brought to Africa by the slave-trading Portugeuse, is just the sort of complex story of that Michael tells so well.

    As Michael might advise, no waste. Left over piri-piri sauce made their way into Deviled Eggs. The leftover shortribs were the basis for agredolce sauce for pasta, a nod to both the Spanish trade with Philippine trade and the Italian presence in Africa. 

     VERZUZ has broken the boredom of COVID lockdowns! It inspired me to bake two desserts for tasting. 

SPICED LEMON CHESS PIE, IN HONOR OF JOE SINCHCOMB

 VERzUz 

TIGERNUT CUSTARD TART WITH CINNAMON POACHED PEARS, IN HONOR OF TONI TIPTON-MARTIN

    My fascination with the Atlantic Creole world and the African Diapora in the American South and West, led me to the Southern Foodways Alliance. I thought this would help me understand my father and grandmother's southern roots. As one of my cousins and one of my favorite writers live in Mississippi, I travelled to SFA's Fall Conference, and there met Joe Stinchcomb and Toni Tipton-Martin. 

    Joe Stinchcomb is a gracious presence at Oxford, Mississippi where I also met his imaginative cocktails. To me his sophisticated charm is the best combination of Southern and Metropolitan, gentleman and scholar of his craft.

    Toni Tipton-Martin convened the first and ground-breaking A Soul Summit. She brought together in one place many of the Black American figures in The Rise. When her book tours for The Jemima Code and Jubilee brought her near my home grounds, I had the pleasure her company and her food.   

 

Tiger-nut Poached Pear Tart versus Spiced Lemon Chess Pie from The Rise

    Everyone who tasted these pies, including the life-guard staff at our city pool, had a tough time declaring the winner. Both are keepers. The stories they tell speak to the breadth of dialects, if you will, of Black food, the very topic that Toni has emphasized.

    Joe Stinchcomb is a master at combining the unexpected in his cocktails, 

Chess pie has puzzled me since I first heard my grandmother use the term. I thought that it ought to have a pattern of light and dark squares, but it doesn't. Some say it is a pie that arose out of scarcity, but this one speaks in luxurious amounts of butter, sugar, eggs and buttermilk. The secret spice in the Lemon Chess pie is Grains of Paradise, aframomum melegueta, native to West Africa. Its peppery yet citrus-y tang in takes away any resemblance of the filling to lemon curd. It is witty, but understated.

    For the poached pear tart, I was concerned I'd not find tigernuts, even in ethnic markets. Toni suggested almond flour as the best substitute. No worries, Amazon/Whole Foods could deliver tiger nuts and tiger nut flour, in a day. 

    The flour the tigernut, actually a tuber, proved easy to work with, both as crust and filling. The flavor is like almond flour, and made me think of frangipani, the almond cream, beloved by French pastry cooks. Frangipani shows up in the New Orelans Picayune Creole Cookbook, the old testament of my cookbook collection. Toni writes of and to a successive generations of home cooks, black and white, for whom French tecniques are part of the batterie du cuisine. I'm one of them, having followed the Julia Child cult back in the day. The cinnamon poached pear is the visual needed to shine on a sophisticated dessert table, whether for Jack and Jill or the Junior League. It's a recipe that lets me share with Toni evolutions in my home cooking as I traveled and moved from city to city and coast to coast.

 

    

 

The Rise: The Cookbook

     

 Samuelsson's 6 Cookbooks top;
The Escoffier Cookbook lower right.

    What is a cookbook, anyway?  Depends. The late Molly O'Neill, in her Introduction to American Food Writing, An Anthology With Classic Recipes, wrote that much food writing in the first decade of 21st Century belonged to the genre of "My Awakening and What I Ate." She credits this to M.F.K. Fisher's 27 books, describing Fisher's various awakenings and what she ate, in mildly luscivious, gluttonous prose. 

    Escoffier's classic cookbook is the opposite of that. It has two parts: Part I, The Fundamental Elements of Cooking and Part II, Recipes and Methods of Procedure. Escoffier was a sort of user's manual for the kind of kitchen where Samuelsson spent six months as a commis: The Victoria Jungfrau, in Interlaken, Switzerland. 

The brigade, a hierarchy of specialized operators, functions as a team.

    Samuelsson was trained in the Escoffier method, but his cookbooks show the influence of M.F.K. Fisher. Samuelsson's recipes are more than ingredients and instructions. 

    Six cookbooks and a memoir in 17 years is a lot of awakenings. In Aquavit (2003), Samuelsson awoke to life in New York City and refreshed the Swedish standards with techniques and tastes he'd learned from his Franco-Swiss training and his world travels. 

     In Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa (2006) Samuelsson discovered not only the foods and favors of Africa, but regained his Ethiopian father and half-siblings.

    The New American Table (2009) celebrated the immigrant food of the United States.  Samuelsson himself had become an American citizen a decade earlier.

    His memoir Yes,Chef (2012), divided into sections called Boy, Chef and Man, chronicled the awakening called growing up. Samuelsson made a home, started a family and opened a restaurant in Harlem. The recipes for what he ate are in Marcus Off Duty (2014).

    The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem (2016) reads like a personal diary of what Harlem taught him: the African American experience since the Civil War. The recipes also read like the notebooks of flavor possibilities which Samuelsson kept and reaches to for inspiration. (Playlists included.)

     The Rise (2020) is different, part manifesto, part homage. This is not homage in the same way that Chef Corey Lee's menu for his In Situ restaurant in San Francisco. In Situ is a tastable food museum located in the city's Museum of Modern Art, where Lee presents the signature dishes his favorite chefs, with their permission, of course. You went there, pre-COVID,  to look at modern art and eat expensive modernist metropolitan food. 

    Samuelsson's approach enables you to make and taste future classics at home, and to dream of life of eating out after COVID,

    Yes, The Rise is remembrances and recipes, but with a purpose. Samuelsson uses his Star Chef powers to elevate and make visible Black chefs and culinary professionals from all over the Country. It is, he writes, "a cookbook about race, class and the equity of the American food landscape."

    Recipes are arranged "in honor of" over fifty Black creatives, featuring intriguing histories of their culinary careers, followed by Samuelsson's riff recipes. Like a jazz composer, he encapsulates their stories and recipes reflecting on their particular style. 

    To guide you through these compositions, right up front, a Recipe Guide serves as cross-index organized by drinks, appetizers, soups, salads, fish-seafood-poultry-meat, grains, vegetables, breads and pantry staples. Mise en place lovers will find that Escoffier's Part I lives on in the Pantry Staple section's procedures and ingredients.

     Finding excellent Black chefs from across the country was not difficult. 

    The cookbook groups these talents into four sections, arranged under the headings: Next, Remix, Migration and Legacy. The Next section features  "Cutting Edge" chefs are located in New York and other metropolitan areas. Many were born in the Caribbean, and influenced by the special mix of African and European of each different island. All new to me and intriguing, as you'll see in my next installment: The Food.

    I was on more familiar ground with the characters in the later chapters. Here are figures I've relied on to learn about African American cooking. Some were founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

    Remix touches on variation in Black cooking across geographies and cultures. You'll find the food work of Adrian Miller and Therese Nelson. Toni-Tipton Martin brought many of the chefs in Remix, and the following chapers, to the ground-breaking Soul Food Summit conference some 5 years ago.    

    Mississippi Mixologist Joe Stinchcomb is featured in the Migration Chaper.  The Legacy chapter honors food journeys from Africa to the Americas, and stories of reclamation: BJ Dennis, Jessica Harris, Leah Chase, Mashima Bailey, Michael Twitty, Rodney Scott, Carla Hall.

    Overwhelmed? I was, and I wondered where to start, how to put together a meal. 

    Here's the secret: once you go down these delicious paths, your mouth will tell you which connect and compliment others. As a student of Atlantic Creole languages, I know that both vocabulary (flavors) and grammar (technique) survived the Middle Passage. Now I can taste the different ways these have flourished in the African Diaspora. I call them distincticve but mutually intelligible dialects.

    On the other hand, I am planning a versus between the Spice Lemon Chess Pie, in honor of Joe Stinchcomb and my Mississippi relations, and the Tigernut Custard Tart with Cinnamon Poached Pears for Toni Tipton-Martin, with gratitude for her leadership.

    As Marcus Samuelsson says: "Let's cook, let's eat, Let's Rise." 

    And may we all rise together and be free.

    

 

    

    

THE RISE Arrives

              

At your bookstore now.

    In March of this year, as COVID 19 took the country into its grip, Chef Marcus Samuelsson was in Miami, Florida, cancelling the opening of an outpost of his Harlem restaurant, Red Rooster. Like many in his industry, he pivoted to providing meals to his neighbors, through José Andres' World Kitchen. 

    Meantime, police violence against African-Americans in the United States continued. Black Lives Matter crystalized concerns about structural racism, as well as overt and implicit racial bias in every aspect of American society and economy.

    In August, the media behemoth, Condé Nast responded to racism at their flagship Bon Appetite magazine. Two women of color were named to top editorial positions. Shortly later, Condé Nast hired Samuelsson as Brand Ambassador and holiday-edition guest editor of the magazine.

    This last caught my imagination. Could this be a reason to forgive Condé Nast for shuttering Gourmet? My local library had Samuelsson's books and was doing drive-by pickups. I started reading his memoir and cooking from his five earlier cookbooks. I pre-ordered The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food, and cooked from the snippets of it, as shown on Amazon.

    Finally, it's October, and yesterday, I greeted the UPS man as he delivered the book. 

    A cookbook and a manifesto, The Rise is a significant event in the culinary history of our country. Marcus Samuelsson is a Star Chef for the 21st Century. He's the Chef from Wakanda, envisaging an Afro-futurist world cuisine. By that I mean that he enlarges Black cultural creativity to include all members the African Diaspora. Re-centering Africa make it visible as the source for the many foods stuffs, flavors and traditions essential to both New World and European cuisines. 

    But what does a 74 year old white woman who has lived in California for the last 25 years know about Marcus Samuelsson's world? I was born in New York and raised in the suburbs, on a middle class Yankee diet, only slightly less reliant on fish that the Swedish fare Samuelsson learned from his adoptive grandmother. I only passed through Harlem's bustling 125th Street on the train to Manhattan's Grand Central Station.

    As I teenager, I did become familiar with the insular WASP world of Manhattan's magazine, publishing and advertising establishments. My writer father's Ivy League credentials gained him entree, but not full acceptance. He was born in the mid-west, to a Dixiecrat and the daughter of an Irish immigrant, and his refusal to conform to expected behaviours meant limited success.

    I trained as an art historian, anthropologist and linguist. Travel and exploration of the world's different cuisines became my habit. It began in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, and later Europe and Asia, both on the ground, in my cookbooks and my Gourmet subscription. West Africa, I only heard about from my younger sister who did Agricultural Extension work in Mali and Nigeria. 

    In 2009 when Condé Nast shuttered Gourmet, I began a serious study of how the magazine presented Asian food starting in 1941. I learned that while that representation reflected changes in world politics and immigration patterns, it was governed by the tastes of same insular, mostly WASP gate-keepers: magazine editors, advertising executives and corporate vice-presidents. Until Ruth Reichl arrived in 1999, the voices chosen to tell the story of Asian cuisines were seldom Asian, and not always chefs.

    Later I consulted the archives to understand the mechanisms for producing the famous Time/Life Foods of the World series. As with Gourmet, the nominal authors of these cookbooks were seldom chefs. They were chosen because of name recognition in the literary world, often expatriats in cosmopolitan New York City.

    Seen through this perspective, Marcus Samuelsson's The Rise deserves much attention, and I plan to review it in five courses: 

As a cookbook, a collection of recipes. 

For of the food itself. (Always the fun part!)

As an extension of Samuelsson's memoir Yes, Chef, and his previous five cookbooks.

    As both defiance and confirmation of the continuing prejudices of the advertising and publishing establishment. 

As a manifesto for expansion of taste, and recogntion of the work of Black Chefs.

At the suggestion of my friend and colleague, Joi Chevalier, I'll illustrate these words with mixed media collages like this one: