Get a First Look at Bryant Terry’s Genre-Defining New Cookbook, Black Food
What does “Black food” really mean? In his groundbreaking new cookbook, the award-winning chef, author, and vegan authority Bryant Terry proves there are many different answers to this question. Black Food (out October 19 from Terry’s new publishing imprint, 4 Color Books) brings a diverse and carefully curated collection of essays, art, and recipes from more than a hundred different Black visionaries across the globe. Here is just a taste.
Black Food has early roots in my desire to uplift Black women. When I was growing up, I saw the women in my family as they were: majestic, graceful, and generous. Respected and cherished by loved ones and our Memphis community, they gathered us in welcoming spaces full of chatter and laughter. They fed us delicious meals of tender okra and purple hull peas, low-and-slow-cooked collard greens, creamy potato salad, meltingly tender cabbage sautéed in bacon fat, velvety braised Great Northern beans, and hand-churned ice cream. It didn’t occur to me then that my mother, aunties, and grandmothers also had to endure racist contempt and sexism, compartmentalizing indignities as they worked in the wider world.
I decided early that my life’s work was to take on poverty, malnutrition, and structural racism, all of which fed off one another. Dressed in my crisp double-breasted chef’s jacket and apron at the Natural Gourmet Institute culinary school, my aim wasn’t to become a celebrated restaurateur, but to develop projects to help uplift historically marginalized communities. I launched my first program, b-healthy, in 2001 to reshape New York City public school students’ relationship with food through cooking lessons. From there, the work continued.
This book is the culmination of my vow to serve the needs, hopes, and dreams of the people. It’s packed with recipes, art, poetry, and essays (some of which you’ll find excerpted in the pages that follow) from more than 100 contributors. I hope it will wake those sleeping on the future, the one in which Black food and the people who carried it across the globe for centuries will finally be centered, supported, respected, and celebrated.
Black Food honors our earliest ancestors, today’s innovators, and tomorrow’s visionaries. It is grounded in the work of chef Edna Lewis, who celebrated local cuisines with seasonal ingredients, and the countless, nameless Black women and men who paved the way for her. It reaches for tomorrow in the budding greatness of Rahanna Bisseret Martinez, a 17-year-old chef who has a cookbook forthcoming with my new publishing imprint, 4 Color Books, that will continue to shine a light on BIPOC voices. It creates space for everyone in between and all who will come after. And as we combine our many unique voices into one, it empowers us all: a global community.
As with my previous books, Vegetable Kingdom and Afro-Vegan, recipes are the through line of Black Food. I asked brilliant colleagues to offer dishes that embody their approach to cooking and draw on history and memory while looking forward. They came up with a wide range of recipes, representing the depth and breadth of Black food and the people who make it. There are starters and mains, drinks and desserts, including Jocelyn Delk Adams’s sticky-sweet Cinnamon Roll Pound Cake. And though I’ve made my reputation as a vegan food advocate—and there are plenty of vegan dishes in the book—a healthy share of these recipes showcase animal proteins. I made sure, also, to include food representative of the diaspora: across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Nicole A. Taylor’s Cocoa-Orange Catfish honors Black farmers in West Africa and Brazil. Kia Damon’s creamy Sweet Potato Grits are an ode to her grandmother, who always had a pot simmering on the stove. And, in a continuation of the book’s mission, you’ll also find below my Dirty South Hot Tamales With Jackfruit and Cilantro Sauce, an original recipe I developed for Bon Appétit to honor my dad’s childhood in Memphis and showcase the cultural crossover between Mexican and African American cuisine in the American South.
More than a collection of recipes, Black Food, which is inspired by Toni Morrison’s seminal classic The Black Book, samples from the perspectives of essayists, poets, thinkers, and community leaders. I want readers of the book to engage with their various odes to the Black experience, from an examination of Africa’s far-reaching culinary influence to a reflection on the deep connection between spirituality and land. And while this book would not have been possible without the support of San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, its true origins remain with the women in my family. This book is dedicated to them. — Bryant Terry
Illustration by George McCalman1/12Ebony Derr on Community
Food has long been a foundational element to establishing community, especially for Black people. To feed one’s own body is an act of pure compassion and support. Feeding those we care for is nourishment for the soul. —Ebony Derr, financial manager at The Okra Project
Photo by Oriana Koren, food styling by Lillian Kang, prop styling by Jillian Knox2/12Cocoa-Orange Catfish
Illustration by George McCalman3/12Jessica B. Harris on Diaspora
There are many different and differing views of the African continent. For some it represents problematic politics and poverty; for others it’s empires and elegance. Our contradictory images include the mythical land of Wakanda, home of the Black Panther superhero, and the horrific reality of the brutal dictator Idi Amin. We know the continent is vast, one into which the United States could fit comfortably three times. But we know very little else about this land ringed in legends, and even less about its foodways. Yet the profound influence of those foodways can be felt a hemisphere away through the vicissitudes of the transatlantic slave trade and the diaspora that it unleashed. Taste the food of Salvador, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia, and you have tasted Africa. Taste the rich brown stews of Jamaica, and you’ll taste Africa’s hand in the pot. Taste the food of Guadeloupe, Guyana, and Georgia’s Low Country, and Africa’s culinary influence, whether in technique, ingredients, or recipes, is palpable. Africa’s agricultural know-how rendered the fields of the New World more productive, while Africa’s recipes morphed, took on New World inflections, and transformed the tastes of a hemisphere. —Jessica B. Harris, author and culinary historian
Photo by Oriana Koren, food styling by Lillian Kang, prop styling by Jillian Knox4/12Dirty South Hot Tamales With Jackfruit and Cilantro Sauce
Illustration by George McCalman5/12Klancy Miller on Joy
In culinary school I used my senses, learning by sight when a pastry cream is cooked, learning by smell when a caramel was nearly burned, getting the feel of viennoiserie when making croissants. But senses are the conduits of pleasure outside the kitchen too. After class I learned to bring my sensual self to life in lots of different ways—from dressing well to having dinner parties, going to museums and parks, exploring the city, enjoying idle moments, romancing myself, flirting. —Klancy Miller, founder of For the Culture
Photo by Oriana Koren, food styling by Lillian Kang, prop styling by Jillian Knox6/12Cinnamon-Roll Pound Cake
Illustration by George McCalman7/12Leah Penniman on Land
Our ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds and promise into their hair before being forced into the bowels of transatlantic slave ships. They hid sesame, black-eyed pea, rice, and melon seed in their locks. They stashed away amara kale, gourd, sorrel, basil, tamarind, and kola seed in their tresses. The seed was their most precious legacy, and they believed against odds in a future of tilling and reaping the earth. That their descendants would exist and receive and honor the gift of the seed. With the seed, our grandmothers also braided their esoteric and cultural knowledge. For them the earth was not a commodity but a family member. They did not expect a seed to grow without the requisite prayer, offerings, song, and propitiation. They did not see themselves as masters of creation but as humble members of a delicate web of sacred beings.
There are those among their descendants who remember the legacy of that seed and honor the spiritual ecology of this lineage. Through traditional African festivals, rituals, and sacrifice, they work to maintain balance in our world. —Leah Penniman, codirector and farm manager of Soul Fire Farm
Photo by Oriana Koren, food styling by Lillian Kang, prop styling by Jillian Knox8/12Sweet Potato Grits
Illustration by George McCalman9/12Freda Muyambo on Culture
I was born and raised in Botswana. My parents come from Ghana. My ancestors? From elsewhere. They carried with them a rich history, some of which I may never know. There is a sense of longing that comes from the distance between me and the motherland. The culture. And so, I tell stories, I ask questions, and I cook food, and these all form a part of the journey of looking for something bigger than individual experiences. —Freda Muyambo, writer and cook, My Burnt Orange
Photo by Oriana Koren, food styling by Lillian Kang, prop styling by Jillian Knox10/12Grape-Tarragon Spritzer
Illustration by George McCalman11/12Sarah Ladipo Manyika on Memory
Nadine, Toni Morrison’s housekeeper, opens the door and lets us in. Morrison is not yet ready to receive us, so we wait upstairs in the living room, where Morrison has said “make yourselves at home.” Nadine is in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Soon there’s a loud sizzle and I catch the sharp bite of onion and peppers, turning sweet as they fry. I can smell tomato in there too. It smells like home, like jollof. Back in Nigeria we used to eat jollof on Sundays, after church services, and when celebrating Eid with friends at the end of Ramadan. The best part, if you could get to it, were the crackly bits of rice stuck to the bottom of the pan. Jollof is both everyday and party food, but no celebration is complete without it and when served with fried plantains, it’s heaven. “Fish,” Nadine says, when I walk over to ask what she’s preparing. “Something healthy for Mrs. Morrison.” Her words are lightly seasoned with the flavor of Jamaica. —Sarah Ladipo Manyika, novelist, short story writer, and essayist
Click here to read Manyika’s full essay on what Toni Morrison’s house smelled like.
