“Imagine an Ashanti bride cooking rice in Kingston. Imagine a thirsty Yoruba king in a Cuban canebrake. Imagine a kidnapped Dahomey queen in the kitchen of Mount Vernon. Imagine a Hausa holy man, a Muslim, serving ham at Monticello, a Mandinka drummer stirring mint juleps in Kentucky, a Guinea dancer in the cookhouse of Tuckahoe Plantation on the James River in Virginia.”1
Vertamae Smart Grosvenor
Colonizers in both North and South America ate food that was grown, cared for, picked, preserved, prepared, and presented by Black hands for more than four centuries. These Africans combined the skills and tastes brought with them from their vastly different backgrounds, with the kitchen implements of the colonial New World, with advice and knowledge of Indigenous peoples. Throughout the centuries, these flavors, techniques, and recipes mixed and melded in different ways, according to their different geographic locations. The resulting foods and foodways have been passed on from generation to generation, from enslaved to free, and the Gullah Geechee chefs of today are the inheritors of this knowledge.
Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, Matthew Raiford and Sallie Ann Robinson are three of the many Gullah Geechee chefs who have used their cooking and storytelling to share the histories and intersectionalities of Gullah Geechee foodways. While sharing delicious recipes, their storytelling cookbooks also center the knowledge and histories of their communities and ancestors, giving readers both a literal and metaphorical taste of their culture.
Cornelia Walker Bailey was not a chef by trade, but as a cornerstone of her Saltwater Geechee community on Sapelo Island, her memoir also shows the interconnectedness of Gullah Geechee people with their land, the environment and their communities. She also dives deeply into some of the critical issues facing Gullah Geechee people today, like land loss and the reclaiming of their histories from academic institutions.
The Books
- Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in the Americas’ Family Kitchen. Available here.
- Matthew Raiford, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer. Available here.
- Sallie Ann Robinson, Cooking the Gullah Way: Morning, Noon, & Night. Available here.
- Cornelia Walker Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Available here.
These pages will include direct quotes from the books and media, such as YouTube videos and podcasts where the authors are speaking. This is so that, as much as possible, the chefs can tell their own stories in their own words.
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Footnotes
- Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 13. Available here.