Getting away from science fiction for a bit, this is a cookbook containing recipes from African American cooks spanning the last two centuries. The author has put together a good mix of dishes that go beyond what people typically consider as “soul food”.
I’ll start off by saying that after reading this book from the library I then went onto Amazon and bought a copy to keep for myself. The recipes in this book are ones that I often want to try to make here in Japan – you rarely see any of these dishes at restaurants here and if you do they are completely changed to fit the tastes of Japanese customers.
Having said that, the book is more than just a list of recipes. The writer has done a lot of research to find recipes through history that were cooked by black people, whether they were enslaved, free, or from other countries. There is a lot of talk about “reclaiming” a recipe and plenty of information about people and the history around their interpretation of a dish. For me, I’m just looking for delicious food – so I don’t really worry about what color the cook was, what race can say the are the originators of a dish, what label should be applied to what variety of dish, etc. etc. So this was extraneous information for me and I just focused on the recipes.
I’ve noticed that I tend to prefer reading books on food that focus on the food (the ingredients) itself. For some reason the culture and the individual people who cook the food have little interest for me – so in this book most of that information wasn’t important. Dropping names and celebrating people’s accomplishments are better suited for the biography section – just give me that delicious food!
Luckily this book delivers on that and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the recipes soon!
Next is The Bird King, by G. Willow Wilson.
