My America | Food & Wine Leave a comment
My America is a country of countless flavors and endless adaptation. The Bronx, where I grew up, contains multitudes: the Jamaicans of Gun Hill Road, where my father, himself half Jamaican and half Nigerian, lives; the West Indians from Wakefield; the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans of the south side, where I lived with my mother and sister; and countless more. With language, music, fashion, and, most importantly, food, they proudly proclaim that though they belong there, they are from elsewhere.
Jamaican corner bakeries sell hardo bread and jerk chicken. Closet-sized Trinidadian roti shops are fragrant with curries and paratha. In our own home, what my mom cooked was part of another sort of story, the food of the American South and its Black sons and daughters. Crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, and potatoes tinged with russet-red house spice told of her own family’s lineage, embroidered into the southern coast of Louisiana and Texas, then north with the Great Migration. As a not-yet chef, I consumed all of these cultures with gusto. My world opened up at the table. Food was, and continues to be, how I make sense of the world.
But by the time I entered culinary school, I had mentally cordoned off the food I loved from the food I wanted to make professionally. The fine-dining kitchen was a universe of clean cuts, fluorescent light, precise technique, luxury ingredients, and far-flung flavors, so foreign to my own experience that I was immediately enchanted. I wanted to be part of this well-heeled universe, and the fact that nobody looked like me and few looked like they liked me didn’t get in the way. Nor did the fact that when I returned to the Bronx or to Harlem, feeble with exhaustion after a 14-hour shift, the food that gave me joy, let me know I was home, had nothing to do with the wizardry of downtown. I sustained myself on pollo asado, red beans and rice, egusi stew, Senegalese thiéboudienne, and chicken yassa.
At the Culinary Institute of America, my fellow students and I were put through the paces of French tradition. The techniques, the sauces, the ingredients, the language, the white hats, the clean toque, the “oui, chef”—all this formed a pyramid with France at the top. Like anyone learning a foreign language, I found the process exciting. And I learned how to form words, then sentences, and eventually stories with these techniques. But whose stories was I trying to tell?
When I finally did open my own restaurant, a short-lived venture called the Shaw Bijou in Washington, D.C., I went to great lengths to tell my own story, expressed in true decadence. The halal chicken and rice I ate growing up became a rice chip with lamb sweetbread glazed in chicken jus. Jerk chicken became jerk duck prosciutto with a pistachio tuile. The menu nodded to my time in the Bronx, to my mother, to my dad, to my Jamaican aunties and Louisiana cousins. But although it was an autobiography, in hindsight, it was an autobiography written in a borrowed tongue.
At my second restaurant, Kith/Kin, also in D.C., I developed a menu made of what was familiar to me: the seafood gumbo and dirty rice of my mother and maternal grandmother; buljol and roti from my Trinidadian grandfather, Papa Winston; the suya and fufu I remember from Nigeria; the curried goat and brown stew chicken from my Jamaican grandma, Gloria, my dad’s mom. And, of course, because the food of the Bronx is as much a part of me as all that, I saw a place on the menu, too, for rice and beans, pollo asado with a side of mojo, tostones, and maduros.
As I began to excavate deeper into my ancestral kitchen, a few things became clear. The first was that I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. Just because I had spent my entire life eating my mother’s cooking, or my grandmother’s, didn’t mean I could cook it myself. This food, my food, I had always understood from the outside. Now, I learned it from the inside out.
The second realization came about as I began to see just how interconnected these diasporic cuisines are. They are not islands but part of the same river. I saw jollof and jambalaya as two traditions that fed Africans in vastly different circumstances. I heard the echoes of the one-pot stews of Nigeria in the one-pot stews of the American South. So much of diasporic cuisine—not just from the American South but from the Caribbean, too, as well as African cuisine itself—has been influenced by the slave trade. Rice, for instance, which West Africans excelled in cultivating, made them particularly attractive to human traffickers who needed skilled workers in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. One reason collard greens are so important is that they were one of the few ways enslaved Africans could feed themselves. Jerk was originally developed by Maroons—freed African slaves in Jamaica—to preserve meat without being detected and then captured and killed. These recipes represent survival.
My latest cookbook, My America, is an expression of the fact that I, too, am part of this diaspora. During the writing of it, I went back to places like Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the American South to enrich my memory with new experiences. The book is ancestral knowledge that I’ve married with my own unique personal experience and culinary know-how to show how brilliant the kitchens of my people are. The recipes I share here represent my America; they’re a love letter to those who made it here, made me here. But they’re also full of those whose names I never knew. My America is for my mom and her people, my dad and his. It’s a land that belongs to you and yours and to me and mine.
