“True noble animal, I hope you felt no pain.”
– Anthony Bourdain
In the “Cajun Country” episode of Anthony Bourdain’s television program No Reservations, he seeks to discover the roots of the Cajun people of Lousiana. Bourdain travels to New Orleans to see the birth of jazz and the resurrection of classic cuisine. On this expedition Bourdain paints a vivid, sometimes disturbing, picture of what life in Louisiana looks like without its sequins. Continue reading
It started when I was young. Every few months my Dad would come home from the store, sit me up on our kitchen island, and we would bake a cake together. We started with the box mix. We’d measure out the flour and oil together, my Dad holding the cups steady in contrast to my uneven pour. He’d even let me break the eggs myself – although that, unfortunately, often resulted in us fishing out a few bits of shells. As I grew older and spent less time at home, my Dad and I were able to bake together less and less; yet, we were able to become more diverse in our baking style: we moved on from boxed cake mixes to more advanced brownies and cupcakes. Soon, we were only baking together over Christmas break, using premade gingerbread dough to create Christmas masterpieces. We bought special cut-outs and rainbow-hued icings in order to create an appealing scene of purple reindeer, polka-dotted gingerbread women, shiny North stars, and even a gingerbread man with a fondness for lederhosen. Continue reading
Nana Never Says No Cake
I am one of the few fortunate children that get to live fifteen minutes from their grandparents. The distance was perfect: too far to walk by myself, but close enough I could go every weekend. My grandfather was a special man, but my grandmother is my Nana. A short woman, not more than 5” 1’, she is perfectly huggable. She is a beautiful, kind, stubborn woman that can make anyone do anything she wants by simply asking. Her favorite vacation is the guilt trip, and she has been in retirement for 40 years. Nana has been seemingly preserved in time—with the exception of a few smile lines and about ten grey hairs, she never aged a day over 57. The only hint of her age, a number I am sure to never know for certain, is in her eyes; their deep chocolate glow seems to only grow stronger with every great- grandchild. She lives in a very small house that her father built in a quickly dilapidating town with no stoplights. A twenty-four-hour chicken-processing plant took residence at the end of the adjacent street, but despite the shape of the community, Nana loves her little house. Frankford, Delaware is her town and she isn’t going to let it go without a fight. To this day she sits in the same pew she sat in with her parents as a little girl. Needless to say, Nana is a woman of habit and tradition. Continue reading
This recipe comes from the 1982 cookbook West African Cooking for Black American Families by Adele B. McQueen and Alan L. McQueen. This cookbook was published at a time when African-American cookbooks were on the rise, presumably as an effort to define the meaning of blackness in the era following the emergence of what has come to be known as “soul food” (Bower 117). Before writing this book, McQueen collaborated with the International Women’s Club of Liberia and ran a test kitchen at Howard University to blend traditional African and American cooking (Tipton-Martin 166). The original recipe in Adele B. McQueen’s cookbook is a simple one consisting of groundpeas (groundnuts), chicken, onion, mushrooms, egg, salt, and pepper, which are combined in a stew and served over rice. Modern influence is clear here, as McQueen suggests substituting peanut butter if groundnuts cannot be found. Continue reading