Stuck off the beaten track, but surrounded by the heavy traffic of a congested city, the Grand Market in Virginia Beach, Virginia is not an easy one to pinpoint, even with GPS tracking technology. But “Sam’s” voice droned “Turn right, then left,” and somehow I managed to avoid the motorcycle on a kamikaze path to my…
Category: African Cooking
A Juneteenth Commentary: Edna Lewis and the Myths Behind Southern Cooking
Powered by the mythology that has grown up around Southern food over the last several years, many voices claim ownership, hurling harsh accusations of cultural appropriation, and silencing and shaming contrary opinions. The argument is not easy to prove, as it remains hampered by a lack of statistics, contemporary documentation, and clear evidence of outright…
African Cuisines: Cookbooks for Exploration and Discovery of Superb Flavors
Only one of this year’s new releases in print cookbooks covers the cooking of Africa, unless you count books about Moroccan cooking by Fatéma Hal and Z. Guinaudeau, as well as Kittee Berns’s Teff Love: Adventures in Vegan Ethiopian Cooking. The rest only come in Kindle editions, a medium which is not my first choice…
What is “American” Food?
Jean Hewitt, author of The New York Times Heritage Cookbook (1980), stated that “It is unfortunate that a foreign visitor can travel on our superhighways from coast to coast [about 1544 miles], Maine to Florida, and go away with the impression that Americans subsist largely on a diet of hot dogs, hamburgers and soggy French fries.” (p….
Peanuts and the Cooking of West Africa
Writers throw out the words “African cooking” all the time. I know. I have written same words, to my great embarrassment. But stop and think about something for a moment. The term “African cooking” is just as ridiculous as calling the cooking of Europe “European cooking,” lumping together the cuisine of France with that of…
Cassava, One Rugged World-Traveling Ingredient
Cassava, for me, remains the Sleeping Beauty of Latin American kitchens. I remember clearly the first time I ever ate cassava. I was sitting on a porch in a Paraguayan boarding house, torrential rain streaming hard off the thatched roof. I really didn’t know what I was doing there, on so many levels. Behind that wall of water, the cook – a…
