I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between recipes and narrative. I find myself drawn to books and projects that center personal stories, but I still see recipes as catalysts for integrating ideas. I am especially bewitched by books in the blurry space between memoir, oral history, and cookbook. (If you have favorite examples in this genre, please send them my way!)
Two years ago, a wonderful friend’s partner introduced me to a non-linear memoir/cookbook from 1970 called Vibration Cooking or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by the late Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who went on to become a celebrated radio journalist, documentarian, and cultural anthropologist. (Thanks, Davi and Aaron!) Grosvenor was Geechee, also called Gullah. Both words connote a distinctive Black community historically centered on the islands and coastal communities of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Notably, they cultivate rice in lineage with their Central and Western African relatives.
Grosvenor’s memoir is chock-a-block in recipes, but always described in paragraphs with interjected bits of personal history and little precision in quantities or timing. It’s like calling your aunt and asking for a recipe, as she recollects who she learned it from and why she loves it. The book also includes unforgettable details about Grosvenor’s life as an theater student in Paris (at a fancy restaurant where she was promised haute-cuisine, she was bemused to be served a plate of chitlins), racism on the streets of New York, carrying lunches in shoeboxes during long train rides, finding ways to cook delicious meals during times of poverty, family picnics, her daughter’s poetry. Her voice on the page has both ease and momentum. (She was friends with James Baldwin, and I love thinking of their joyous dinner parties.)
This passage has stuck with me:
[Aunt Verta] would cook for all our cousins who would come through Philly. Even when she hadn’t seen them or had never met them. She would say, ‘They my family, I got to do what I can for them.’ Like Stella says, ‘It ain’t nothing but some food.’ I dig digging your people…. That love of your tribe is important, and if it doesn’t happen in childhood, I don’t believe you can acquire it. When you are tribal you don’t have slots for loving—you love. You can find a different kind of love for everyone. You love Cousin Blanche cause she was your granddaddy’s sister’s child; ‘Aunt’ Belle, even though she ain’t really your blood aunt, but you feel just like she was kin to you. What I mean is, it gives you a big heart.
When she calls out, “it ain’t nothing but some food,” it strikes me as both true—food is relatively inexpensive—and also beautifully hyperbolic, because, as she goes on to say, food is a currency of love. Cooking for others is one of the most tangible ways we can share a piece of who we are. That has been true for people across time—for Aunt Verta, Grosvenor, my parents, me, you.
She also made me think more about how our childhood shapes the openness of our hearts, and what enables people to give generously when they don’t have very much. I’m still thinking a lot about those ideas.
Davi told me that Grosvenor appears in Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash’s 1991 film, so I rushed out to watch it. The movie is set in 1902 during a time of unraveling in a Geechee island community, and Vertamae is unforgettable as the foremother of the community. It was the first feature film directed by a Black American woman that got theatrical distribution in the United States. Yes, that’s right, that didn’t happen until 1991! The movie is hallucinatory—the viewing experience and storyline blurring as though we are also moving slowly through the summer heat before a hurricane. (I was reminded of Beasts of the Southern Wild from 2012.) In my various image and video searches I learned that Julie Dash is making a documentary about Grosvenor’s life as we speak that I am really excited to see.
Good news! I asked Multnomah County Library to buy Vibration Cooking, and they did! (Note: Many public libraries will buy requested books if they don’t have them in their collection.) Portlanders can check it out from the library. Otherwise, it’s worth buying.
In February, my friends Stef and Tony sent me a cookbook that is very different from Vibration Cooking but skirts some of the same paths: In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen and published in late 2020. This cookbook is really my kind of thing—and apparently a lot of other people, since it’s been nominated for some prestigious awards! The book is divided into chapters based on the African countries touching the Indian Ocean: Comoros, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Somalia, South Africa, and Tanzania. Each begins with a Wikipedia-esque overview of the country and then tells the story of its cuisine through recipes from and Q&As with older women who live there or are part of the diaspora. It’s slickly produced—very richly photographed and designed—but I was struck by how casual the interviews were. Repetitive questions are included, shock and smirks translate. These are real women giving real answers. For a quick example, and there are countless, I loved this succinct exchange with Ma Sahra of Kenya:
And who cooked the mchele [rice]?
Me, of course, me.
But when you were younger—who cooked it?
Oh, my mother. My mom.
And this one with Ma Halima of Kenya:
What was your favorite thing to eat growing up?
Ha, who knows. Maybe sheep meat.
There are also long thoughtful answers to questions about what community means, the role of women in their culture, and more, but these little bits of honest dialogue set the tone—casual, direct, sincere.
There is very little politics in the book, but it gave me more inspiration to learn about what’s happening to the Tigray population in Ethiopia and Eritrea (Portland has a large Tigrayan community, most of whom fled Ethiopia and Eritrea under persecution).
The recipes are incredibly precise, which I reluctantly appreciate because I’ve never cooked Somalian food, for example, before and don’t know its food grammar. If you’ve never cooked East African food before, this seems like a good gateway. I loved making the Xawaash spice mixture that set me up for several delicious curries. And if you’re in it for the voices and stories, you’ll find that too.