Veronica Chambers - Meals, music, and muses : recipes from my African American kitchen

with Veronica Chambers

Food and Author Photography by Beatriz da Costa

Food Styling by Roscoe Betsill

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This book is dedicated to my parents and my parents parents and their parents. The ancestors those whose silent voices and extraordinary challenges shaped the world I inherited. Their hardships sacrifices made my life more meaningful and promising because of them I am I stand on their shoulders Grateful Thankful!

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One friend, a frequent guest at my home, keeps me on my toesalways making sure there are plenty of vegetarian options. As I clear the table, he settles in at the piano and the music starts flowing. This is often how the after-party gets going at my house: it just takes one guest to find the piano, and the good times are on.

While I stack trays of my and ready the brandy glasses for bourbon and single malts, I enter the room to a chorus of tunes already being pursued. One particular night, the guest list included opera singers and Harlem neighbors, Broadway stars and pals who are legends only in their own minds. You dont have to be a professional singer, or even on pitch, to gather round a family piano and sing.

I joined in, leading the group of balladeers. We sang one fun hit after another, well into the night. Music and friends, chocolate and bourbon. I never have to leave the house to trip the lights fantastic.

In the United States, food and music are inextricably linked, especially in the African American culture. Both Southern music and Southern food are rooted in a knotty lineage that connects West Africa and Western Europe. Food, music, and love are bound up in interesting, often humorous ways in the Southern vernacular, notes the Smithsonian Folkways Project. The longest running daily radio show in America is the King Biscuit Hour, out of Helena, Arkansas. The show got its name from its first sponsor, King Biscuit Flour. In turn, the company inspired an iconic Big Joe Williams blues song, the King Biscuit Stomp.

In New Orleans and other port cities, vendors made up songs to advertise their wares, giving birth to such songs as Pepper Pot, Horseradish Seller and Cantaloupe Vendor. Little Milton made a hit in 1969 of a song called Grits Aint Groceries. Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley made more than a little innuendo with Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy.

But far and above the food-inspired tunes that are threaded throughout the African American cultural canon, food and music served a dual purpose of nurturing hope and connection from slavery to the struggles of the civil rights movement. The great African American leader Dorothy Height often said, If the time is not ripe, we must ripen the times. In the long march to freedom and equality, African American cooks and musicians have creatively conspired to serve something bigger and better than their circumstances might have dictated.

From my early days working in my grandfathers garden to the Bach cantatas we sang at church before a glorious Sunday supper to the rhythm and blues my parents played as they cooked, music was all around me. They say talking to plants helps them grow; Id like to suggest that cooking without a songin your heart, if nothing elseis like cooking without salt and pepper. Why would you? And what would you expect the result to be?

I spent decades in Europe as a classically trained opera singer, so you have that influence here too: just the same way that African American cooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sometimes sent to Europe to master those techniques and bring them back to our young nation.

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I was just a little kid when James Beard became the Dean of American Cuisine, as Julia Child called him. America, preJames Beard, had a tendency to look upon what was imported as valued, as better. Beard glorified, elevated, celebrated American culinary expression. He was one of those iconic people who said, Were cooking American and its fine cooking, and its worthy of the worlds attention.

It has been my lifes work to explore and exalt the food of the African diasporaand the unsung culinary heroes whose innovative farming techniques laid the agrarian economic foundation for America as we know it today. My ancestors combined a gift for technique with a worldly, off-the-charts flavor profile to create a cuisine that could be served with pride from the White House to your mamas house, from ballrooms to juke joints, and everywhere in between.

This book is a curated set of recipes, a playlist, if you will, of essential African American dishes: the very best of what I have eaten, cooked, and imagined. Ive divided the book into seven styles of African American music that set the bass line for this medley of meals. Jazz is for starters, the scrumptious riffs that set the prelude for the mealalthough you might find, as I often do, that two or three of these starters make the perfect late-night meal or light weekend lunch.

The section on spirituals is where Ive put my rice dishes, my recipes for pasta, grits, and gravies. Spirituals are simple, soulful songs that African American slaves composed to help them survive their darkest days. These dishes make great sides for big meals and are easy one-bowl comfort dishes when your spirits need lifting.

Chapter 3 is all about gospel, gardens, and greens. Gospel music is all about finding the good and praising it. These recipes are joyful vegetable-forward dishes that taste good, and make you feel good.

My first career was as an opera singer, so the next chapter weaves arias with dishes netted from the sea. These are some of my most beloved dishes, the ones that keep my guests coming back for more: fried catfish, seared grouper with a gumbo sauce, sherry she-crab soup. These dishes are easy to master, but so simply elegant that when you serve them, they bring to mind the great Puccini line: I have lived for art. I have lived for love.

I have always loved the great divas of African American music, from Leontyne Price and Kathleen Battle to Diana Ross and Tina Turner. Ive gathered my big-platter, show-off meat and chicken dishes in honor of these larger-than-life ladies of song. From theyre too good to share with folks you like just a little bit. Youll have to consult another cookbook for that!)