Cookbook Survivor: Marcus Samuelsson, The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
So, from one of my oldest cookbooks last week (Rosamund Grant’s Caribbean and African Cookery) to one of my newest, Marcus Samuelsson’s latest, which I’ve had for about six months but haven’t used yet.
By now, if you’ve been reading these columns, you generally know when I have it in for a cookbook and this column is a genuine exercise in possibly pushing it off my shelves and when there’s no real danger to the cookbook I’m featuring. If it’s a new book to me (especially one I bought on purpose) I’m not likely to cast it off on one try, but it’s still good to put a new book through its paces.
Conceptually, this is a great way to approach assembling a cookbook that tries to uphold the core values that Samuelsson and his contributors see in the work of Black cooks, which is that they all call back to some sense of community. Most cookbooks published in the last ten years by professional executive chefs are a form of brand extension, of maintaining some sense of career ascension through a public profile. That’s fine, because that’s also how you have an impact on the future of eating and food. What Samuelsson has done here though is serve essentially as an editor and curator for a large number of practicing Black culinary professionals, each of whom gets a few pages for their recipes.
(It’s a side note but it made me dream a little bit about what a scholarly anthology that was about a particular theme would look like if you just went to a whole bunch of cool people and asked them to write 3-4 pages of their best original scholarly take on that theme, rather than the usual way we do anthologies, which is to round up a bunch of conference papers.)
Anyway, The Rise is a super-appealing book to leaf through because of this design. I encountered some chefs (and their restaurants) that I didn’t know as well as some who were familiar to me, and I mentally bookmarked a good twenty or so recipes to work with and a few ingredient preparations that interest me also. It’s a great-looking book and it has just the right amount of personalized storytelling. Samuelsson also forcefully kicks it off with a clear statement of purpose—to not just lift up the community that he has come to feel part of, but to say to any American reader that this is your food—the food that you have been eating all along in some way or another.
What I’m going to do for tonight is a very interesting catfish preparation from Edouardo Jordan, who owns and operates JuneBaby and Salare in Seattle—it’s got a distinctive spice rub and then is served with a “pumpkin leche de tigre”. I’ve already failed a teeny bit out of the gate because there wasn’t any catfish available at the fishmongers so I’m using flounder instead, but otherwise I’ve got everything I need. I’m also going to do Jordan’s fried plantains, Carla Hall’s “Garden Egg Chow Chow” (it’s an eggplant dish) and Joe Stinchcomb’s cocktail The Bowie, honoring a Black mixologist group that formed in 1889.