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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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
