- 7 months ago
James Beard award-winning authors Toni Tipton-Martin, Chef Nina Compton (Compere Lapin), and Osayi Endolyn join multimedia storyteller LaTonya Yvette to discuss why preserving and documenting Black culture, via our foodways and our home spaces, is essential—not just for cultural legacy, but for our wellness and to reflect, enrich, and inspire community across generations
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hello, hello, hello everyone. How are we doing today? Thank you so much for being here at the
00:06author stage. Thank you for being here for Essence Festival, another fabulous festival, our 31st.
00:11We're here today to have a wonderful conversation with some authors that are just profound. We have
00:16some very profound work that is very much centering the black food experience, black food culture,
00:21black drinking culture, black home, and the things that are just so important to us in our culture.
00:26So I'd like you to help me to welcome them. We have the great Nina Compton. Everybody in New Orleans
00:32knows this Nina Compton. We also have author Tony Tipton-Martin here. Yes. We have writer Osai
00:41Endelin. Did I say that right? Okay. And then we have author Latonya Yvette. Did I say that? Okay,
00:49I said it right, y'all. I feel good already. Welcome, everyone. All right, ladies. For those
00:54who may not be 100% familiar, can you briefly run down the great work that you've done and what
01:00you're known for and your work in very much preserving black cultural stories and black food
01:05stories? I'll start here with you, Osai. Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Osai Endelin,
01:13and I am a writer, editor, producer. My work is largely in food culture storytelling. I'm here
01:21today because I co-authored a book called Quail Creole with Nina. It is a narrative cookbook that
01:28she'll get into probably later. But yeah, I've written several books with folks that kind of drive
01:36forward the experience of the black diaspora through a culinary lens. My work as a writer
01:41tends to really think about food as a pillar of culture, another expression of the many
01:49socioeconomic and political aspects of life. Food is one of those things. And because it is so
01:57personal to us, sometimes it can feel like a very individual experience. But it is one that I think
02:02transcends, you know, all of our understanding of where people go and how they get there and what
02:09they bring with them and what they are forced to leave behind. You can always look to food to fill
02:13in those gaps. So I'm very happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation. Amazing.
02:19Latanya? Make sure it's on. I'm Latanya Vett. I'm the author of three books. My latest book came out in
02:30last November. And its focus is on home and migration and how black people in particular have
02:37made home over centuries. And yeah, I'm just excited to be here. And a lot of my work in storytelling
02:45is through that lens. Okay. Good morning, everybody. My name is Chef Nina Compton. I am a chef that is New Orleans-based, but I'm originally from the small island of St. Lucia. I've been cooking for about 25 years. It's kind of scary to say that. But New Orleans is my home. And as Osei said, we have been cooking for about 25 years.
03:07It's kind of scary to say that. But New Orleans is my home. And as Osei said, we wrote a book that came out in April about the different types of Creole throughout the Caribbean and also in the United States. So it starts in St. Lucia and it bookends in New Orleans. So I hope you guys can get a copy at the end of this discussion. Thank you.
03:29Good morning, everybody. I'm Toni Tipton-Martin. I'm an award-winning journalist. It's really important to me that we talk about journalism as a career because while books are being banned, journalism is under attack. And my work would not exist if it weren't for the ability to write down our stories.
03:57So for those of you that don't know, I have written three books. All of them have been James Beard Award winners. And they were focused on my intention to change the image of African-American women.
04:13I grew very weary of the Mammy character that has been continually portrayed in history, in literature, everywhere we looked as I was growing up as a young journalist. The Mammy was always the defining image for black women.
04:31And I didn't like that. So I did some research and discovered that African-Americans had published cookbooks all the way back to 1827. And I started purchasing them just as evidence that we had left a written record of our identity and it was not to be defined by the broader community.
04:53And what those cookbooks did was then lead me to the ability to tell different stories about black women in the kitchen. And my hope is that if we reclaim our identity in the kitchen, we can reclaim our mental health, our physical health, because we can learn to take care of ourselves and therefore we can take care of our communities. Thank you.
05:15I love that. I love that. I love that. Toni, we're going to actually start with you because you have your recent work, Jubilee. And I wanted to ask you, what was the process like creating that work? And when did you know you were going to do book number two?
05:27So as soon as I bought the black cookbooks, I bought them slowly on eBay and at auction. And in fact, one of them now was published in 1866 and it is now worth at least $20,000. So I think we should acknowledge the value of our history.
05:45But as I was buying those books, I wasn't really sure what the story was that I was going to tell, but I knew it was a very big story. And I started to realize that it was a contrary story to the narrative that we had been all taught in history books.
06:01So the first book is called The Jemima Code, and it is not a recipe book. It is a beautiful coffee table book because my intention was to give these women back their beauty and their dignity.
06:12So it's a coffee table book that is a chronicle of those cookbooks. It's just snapshots of the books and descriptions of the books and the authors, but there's no recipes to speak of.
06:23Once I did that, I realized that there were probably seven other books that I could write from those just based on each chapter and each area of expertise that African-Americans have had throughout culinary history.
06:38So the first book, Jubilee, is just an overview of our competency in the kitchen and how much we contributed to American food culture and the ways that we were erased and dismissed from that.
06:49The second book that's also here is called Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice, and it is a look at the mixology and bartending community where we have made sure, I've made sure that people understand black people weren't just slinging drinks behind the bar.
07:11There was a creativity that was involved there. They understood classic bar keeping. There's theater associated with it.
07:18So my work is designed to just make us look differently at our history and give back the respect and dignity to our people.
07:25And can you all speak to how important it is to do that for us to be able to talk about our culture, our black food, you know, ways and things like that?
07:32The Caribbean, your journey from the Caribbean here to New Orleans and the food that has, you know, been a big part of your life.
07:38Why is it so important for us to be able to document that and preserve that history? What you say?
07:44I'll let you start. I'll tell you.
07:46Why is it important?
07:48Well, I think we can all agree that, especially in the United States, we get fed very systematically a particular narrative, right?
07:57And, you know, especially if you're from the South, I think you know you have an innate understanding of where this culture comes from and how important it has been in shaping American identity, global identity.
08:09But I have found that books have been really helpful in framing that innate, in giving something tangible to that feeling, to that sense that you see through the generations in your family or that you see it kind of filtered through the zeitgeist.
08:26But it's kind of like you're grasping for information. And for me, you know, I'm from California. Half of my family, on my mom's side, they migrated from Mississippi and Louisiana,
08:35to Los Angeles in the 40s. The other half of my family, my father, he's from Nigeria. So he immigrated here in his 20s in the 1970s.
08:44And so even in my household, I was grappling with this intersection of, you know, Western African culture with African American culture.
08:52And it was never really explicitly stated and that it was something that I stumbled upon through my through the beginning of my journalistic career in Atlanta,
09:02where I was seeing the conversation of of American food taking a new shape in southern fine dining restaurants.
09:12And I was suddenly seeing like bene seed and okra and all these ingredients that I was very familiar with from my upbringing,
09:20presented to the world through a French culinary lens, but reclaimed as new American.
09:26And there was some glitch just happening with that. And I like so as I was trying to seek out information, I was meeting people like Tony.
09:33So we've known each other for now, probably 10 years and threading that needle.
09:38So the importance is it also just like the previous panelist said it we're no longer exclusively in an oral history culture.
09:47Right. Even though that's a very important to us still, there is something very tangible about writing things down and having those resources.
09:53So I think part of the importance is to not just frame your own education, but to give a pathway for other people to investigate that knowledge and to find themselves in those stories.
10:04So, yeah. How about you, Tonya?
10:07Yeah, for me, part of my newest work and that research over four years was going back and finding out what did black people in particular own and how did we make home and how are the many ways we've made home over generations.
10:25And it started for me as a parent of two kids in Brooklyn, but also as a New Yorker and sort of grappling with the idea that I didn't own anything and what did that actually mean and how there were and having this also at the same time, this digital archive and this research as far as artists are concerned and how homemaking, it was also a form of art in a way and how we've done that in so many different ways.
10:54So, it's important because I think for me, even writing it down and writing it and putting it in stand in my window was a form of collecting all of these things that I found in different spaces and they were not available to me and I thought about how difficult it was and how I essentially had to go back to school in many ways over those few years.
11:24and how for my children in particular and for other people, I want to make it easier to access and to see and to believe and to remember how we've done things.
11:31How about you, Nina?
11:40Can everybody hear me? Okay, great. So, my story is, it started off in St. Lucia and when I left St. Lucia, I came to America to go to culinary arts.
11:47And for me, it was always going back to after culinary school and for some reason things just kept on popping up in a good way. I got some amazing jobs, got to work for some amazing chefs.
12:03But everything for me had an end because it was always thinking going back to St. Lucia and taking what I learned on my journey and giving it back to my island.
12:25But as I was working in all these different kitchens, I noticed that I was the only black woman, the only immigrant. And that was very hard. It's a very lonely place.
12:39But as I started to understand cooking, and I did a proposal for a book before I even started with Osai many years ago, and the story didn't make any sense because as a chef I didn't really know who I was.
12:55I don't think I was mature enough to understand where I was in my life. And that changed for me when I moved to New Orleans, when I felt a little more centered.
13:06I felt a deep connection with the culture, the food, the people, other similarities with the Caribbean.
13:13And it made me realize there are so many similarities and so many differences in our cuisines.
13:20And then I realized we don't have that many Caribbean cookbooks.
13:25We have some, but they're not a lot.
13:28And if you go to some of the bookstores, it's French, it's Italian, it's something else, but it's not Caribbean.
13:35And we're seeing an influx now of all these chefs like Eric Achapong did a beautiful book about cooking in Ghana and living in Ghana and immigrating to the States.
13:46So we're seeing more of those books now because we have to document those things because we haven't been doing it for so long.
13:53And I'm seeing a beautiful point in life where people are having a sense of pride of where they're from.
14:04They're shouting their stories. They're digging deep.
14:07And I think for me, one of the things I was telling Osais is for me, I want to really express Caribbean food and Creole culture in the best way possible.
14:17And that is by documenting recipes, and that's what I want to do this year, of recipes that are disappearing.
14:26Things that I grew up that people are just, you don't see anymore.
14:30And people are like, oh, we don't make this anymore.
14:32Or we don't have flying fish or we don't eat farine.
14:35And I'm like, this is something I grew up and it's getting lost.
14:39So for me, it's putting those things on my menus and expressing those things is really important
14:45because I want people to understand how I grew up and experience those things.
14:50Because, you know, we eat green fig and salt fish, which we don't eat here, but it's our national dish.
14:57And I want people to know that and understand where that dish originated from.
15:02We have to keep that, you know, documented on paper.
15:08And Toni, I know you have a lot to say on this topic about the importance of preserving.
15:13I have a lot to say about everything.
15:15So give it to us.
15:17So I think what's been described here is the fact that our history has been erased,
15:22which means that we don't have, other than our oral tradition, which has always been important,
15:28but it's hard to refute.
15:29And each one of us has had that same experience.
15:32I grew up in Los Angeles, and with the time that I was coming along,
15:36the only definition for black cooking was soul food.
15:40And I didn't grow up eating that.
15:42So there's no disparagement about it.
15:44There's an incredible amount of ingenuity and intelligence that is associated with the cooking of soul food.
15:50And it's also very much tied to African diaspora cooking.
15:54But it wasn't my experience.
15:56And it wasn't the experience of almost anybody that I knew.
15:59And it made me feel some kind of way, like Osoyi is saying.
16:03There was no real clear lane for me to occupy.
16:07And that adds to our disenfranchisement.
16:10If we don't know where our home is, if we don't know what our food culture is,
16:14it's hard to really thrive in the community when something as simple as what you eat every day is not valued.
16:22So it was really important to me to have the written documentation as well because so many young women would say to me,
16:32I don't cook.
16:33You know, that was like a badge of honor to not cook.
16:36And yet we love those things that our grandmothers and our aunties would make.
16:41So I would say if you value her and you value yourself, at least go cook with her one thing and learn her recipe.
16:50Then it will mean so much to her.
16:52And if she wrote it down, great.
16:54If she didn't, you know, you catch her fingers as she's about to drop the pinch in and put it in a teaspoon if you need to know, you know, how much that is.
17:04But our recipes really do matter.
17:07The last thing I want to say is that the aspect of French cooking has come up a lot here.
17:13And that's been a way of also marginalizing who we've been because if you're not French classically trained,
17:20you know, the way that prominent chefs like Nina are, then you're also dismissed as not being serious or part of the real world.
17:29So what my work is doing and my next book is about is tracing our food through that French culinary training
17:36and making sure people are aware that there were French trained women in the White House under Thomas Jefferson.
17:43And that his primary chef was sent to France to be trained.
17:48And then he trained them.
17:50And this is important because we keep hearing that everything is important if only if it relates through French cooking.
17:57And African-Americans have a very strong, very rich, very valuable history that we should be teaching to our children.
18:05Something that really stuck with me that you both mentioned, you know, you were saying you wanted to highlight different dishes that have kind of started to disappear.
18:15And you were speaking earlier on like when you got all of the cookbooks, you're like, oh, I could make seven different books just based on all of the things that I've all these works that I've approved.
18:24How do you guys decide what things you are going to highlight?
18:27I assume that's extremely difficult to nail down.
18:30So I'd love to hear how you decided for your works.
18:32Okay, well, this is a few recipes that I feel are really important.
18:36We have to make sure we are offering some baked goods as well.
18:39Or we need to make sure we're showing these type of drinks and chefs and things like that.
18:43How do you guys kind of nail down, you know, what is most important to highlight for your works?
18:48I'll go first since mine is more focused on home, even though it has a chapter on food.
18:54But again, the relationship to food was on the table and the table itself being an altar and our history with that and food in the church and things like that.
19:05But I'll say that a lot of it comes from connecting with real people today and listening to their stories and just honestly traveling through other people's stories and kind of diving back into what they first heard or what their grandmother said.
19:30And how and relating it back to myself and what I wish I would have read about that particular person.
19:38So it is about connecting the dots and speaking to one another and being in deep community as far as I'm concerned.
19:45I think for our book, when Osei and I were writing it, we we had a whole list of recipes and titles and we trimmed down and she said to me, she says, we need to pick the most impactful recipes that have a story.
20:02And I think a lot of people, when they think of Caribbean food, they think of jerk chicken and rice and peas, which is it is in the it is in the book, but there is more to that.
20:11And there were some recipes that I chose intentionally to show the differences throughout the Caribbean.
20:20So there's a recipe called Blue Draws, which is in the second chapter in Jamaica, but throughout the Caribbean, each island makes their own version of the Blue Draws and they call it a different name.
20:33So we call it Pemi, people call it Juncanoes, they call it different things in each island and things are different.
20:40In Puerto Rico, they call it pastels and they put raisins and beef and it's more savory where we have it sweet, a sweet cornmeal potato and condensed milk steamed in a banana leaf.
20:54But it's all the same thing. So those are the recipes I wanted to just show the range of these recipes and the different influences because people think that the Caribbean is just one type of person.
21:07It's each island is very different. So you look at something like Barbados that is mostly British or Antigua is mostly British influences.
21:15St. Lucia has French, British, African, Kalinago, sorry, and Indian. So all of those influences dictate the food.
21:26So you look at something like Trinidad that also has a huge range of different people coming in but leaving their mark on that cuisine.
21:35So we wanted to show how similar but also how different all those recipes are and some of those translate to New Orleans as well.
21:43And I'll just add that part of the decision making process for that comes from establishing a structure.
21:49Like we are talking about a book and this is something that we talk about a lot in the making of cookbooks is because, you know,
21:56sadly she's not going to be over your shoulder when you're cooking that jerk or when you're, you know, you're making that sandwich or putting together that sauce to sky, right?
22:07So it needs to be linear in a way that no matter where you are, you can follow it in your kitchen with the skill set that you have.
22:17But to honor her expertise and her culture and her heritage, you're creating a narrative structure.
22:23And so with that structure, then you decide, well, what's going to support this, right?
22:26And the goal of this book was to not only elucidate the Caribbean story that she wanted to tell through the St.
22:33Lucian culture that she comes from, but to demonstrate how through her career as a chef, she was following and building her own curriculum, going to other diasporic places.
22:48So, you know, we talk about her going to Jamaica when she first left St. Lucia, which for her was like her big city experience going to Montego Bay.
22:56If you haven't been to St. Lucia, it's considered a small island in terms of population.
23:00Going to Jamaica was like, you know, a lot of the way that people in the United States speak about going to New York, that was her experience.
23:07Like, oh my God, I don't understand what they're saying. Where do I go? How do I sit? Like all those things.
23:11She goes on to cook in Miami, which if you've been to Miami, you know, that's just another aspect of the Caribbean, right?
23:18So she's, but getting in the Miami experience, she's being introduced to all of the Afro-Latin diaspora.
23:26That was not a part of her experience in St. Lucia.
23:29So now she's seeing the same ingredients being applied differently.
23:32Oh, okay. We call this green fig. You're making something called tostones. I've never heard of that, right?
23:38This is the experience of this, you know, colors how diverse these cultures are.
23:42So with, with the, and then she ends, you know, she ends the book, of course, in New Orleans, where she's been for, you know, the last few years.
23:48But in terms of narrative structure, what that's allowing you to do is say, okay, what are the key recipes that you can personally speak to from your time in Miami and all the different cross sections that she's coming into contact with?
24:01So there were some recipes that we started with in the beginning that didn't make it to the end because they ultimately did not drive forward the narrative.
24:08And as a writer, as an editor, I'm always thinking about how do we get to our goal? Is this demonstrate? Is this, is this compelling?
24:16That's why these books are so readable. You can, obviously we want you to cook from them.
24:20But, you know, I also want you to sit and listen to these stories and look at how each thing is building on the next.
24:26So, you know, the curation in cookbooks is very important.
24:29It's not just an encyclopedia of things people cook in these geographic places.
24:36Such a good summary of the thought processes that we go through as authors.
24:43For me, in addition to everything that Osayi has said, I'm also an editor.
24:48I can't help but doing that toggling back and forth between being the writer, the reader, the cook, like all of those variables.
24:55But the thing that anchored me and always does with my work is, as a journalist, there has to be a first-person source.
25:03And so the root of this work was that the old women were dying.
25:06And I also was from L.A., not from the south.
25:09So I didn't have access to these women.
25:11So I needed a first-person source.
25:13And that's why I went looking for cookbooks.
25:16And what I discovered in the Schomburg Library in New York City is that in the 1930s, a Puerto Rican scholar wrote a book proposal for what he decided in the 30s was the African American canon of recipes.
25:36And it was all kinds of diverse foods.
25:39There were expressions of soul food, for sure.
25:41But there were things that also expressed this French culinary training.
25:46So I used that outline as a treasure map, basically.
25:52And I looked throughout my book collection for evidence that those recipes persisted.
26:00Because what I wanted to be able to do is contradict the narrative that says we were only known for contributing the labor.
26:07You can read a lot about black people participating in the creation of American food.
26:11But what you will read is that we created the labor.
26:14And that we somehow mindlessly stood there and stirred without contributing any of those diasporic experiences.
26:22If the white woman did tell you to stir to the left, for example, in the plantation house, she might have told them that once.
26:29In that kitchen where she was working.
26:32But after that, that woman's natural instincts came in and maybe she serves the other way.
26:36Well, once she did that, that recipe became hers.
26:39And we have not given them credit for that.
26:42So I wanted to see if I could trace what he thought as an objective observer in the 30s throughout our community to the present day.
26:52And what I arrived at was a list of recipes that still exist in black cookbooks or in black restaurants or some version of them.
27:02Which signaled to me, even though there's no written record, that this is an alternative view of black cooking.
27:07These recipes are still in our community circulating, being refined, adapted through different lenses based on our migration, based on our pantry, based on our economics.
27:22But that they tied back to this objective observer who said, this 600 recipes, for all the reasons I named and more, belong to black people.
27:33And at that point, the question for the publisher was like, but you're talking about pound cake and fried chicken and rice and peas.
27:42Like, there was no uniformity in the story other than we made it.
27:49And that was a really big argument for me to have to make with this industry because I was refuting a narrative that said we didn't make it.
27:58So my contention had to be, I'm not saying we made it first.
28:03I'm not saying we made it better.
28:05All I want is the record to show that we made it too.
28:09So the stories that, as Osai said, the stories that are assigned, associated with each recipe are important.
28:17You know, you don't just read another, who needs another recipe for pound cake, right?
28:23Mace, lemon extract, or a little nutmeg, but that's it.
28:28Everybody makes it the same way.
28:30So it was important to me to tell you threads of reasons why each ingredient is in the recipe.
28:37And I do that by pointing out to you what cook in what book did it that way.
28:43And that's how I give them back their identity, is that we don't just take their nutmeg and drop it in and say, oh, some lady made it with nutmeg.
28:53I don't care if you say, I'll end with this.
28:56I don't care if you say, I'm making this delicious lemon pound cake from Jubilee because Tony Martin said.
29:04I want you to make it and share it with your family and say, Melinda Russell made this in 1866,
29:12and Ina Garden, the Barefoot Contessa, has it in her book too.
29:16That's what I want you to say.
29:18Amen.
29:19I love that.
29:20I love that.
29:21Well, being told I have to wrap up, but we know that your work will be very impactful to not just women readers and people who want to make food,
29:27but just to the community at large because you are preserving these stories.
29:30You are telling us about how we build our homes and how the sacred spaces that we create and the food that means so much to where we come from.
29:37So, everybody give a good warm hand of applause to these wonderful authors.
29:42The great Tony Tipton Martin, Chef Nina Compton, LaTonya Yvette, and Osai Endolin.
29:50Am I saying that right?
29:51Endolin.
29:55Thank you so much, everybody, and thank you for having us and having a good time.
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