High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America Part 5

CHAPTER 9.

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.

Sit-ins, Soul Food, and Increasing Culinary Diversity

Atlanta, Georgia- The capital of the New South had held little attraction for me. My first trip there was a humiliating quest for an errant boyfriend that ended with tears, a breakup, and a two-day hangover; it was my first trip to the South. The only good thing about that trip more than thirty-five years ago is that it allowed me to see "Sweet" Auburn Avenue before it became "gentrified." Somehow, I knew enough to take time out from my fruitless mission to sample some of the legendary fried chicken at the old Paschal's restaurant. Paschal's is one of the restaurants where Martin Luther King and his disciples planned some of their Civil Rights strategy. Even in that bad time for me, as I sat in the restaurant, I wondered which booth Dr. King had occupied and what his favorite dishes had been. I was told that the fried chicken figured largely on the menu at those meetings.

It seems that every Southern city has a similar restaurant in the former black part of town. During the Civil Rights Movement, it was the place that became the hub where people from the movement met and planned their strategy. Birmingham has one, as do Memphis, Mobile, and Montgomery. New Orleans has Dooky Chase, and Atlanta has Paschal's and also had Deacon's, although it, like many others, did not survive. Back in the day, they all had similar finished-bas.e.m.e.nt-type decor, with red vinyl booths and knotty-pine paneling on the walls. They also had homey waitresses who cajoled diners into eating more than was good for them and wore nylon uniforms that fitted tightly across ample bosoms, often with a highly starched handkerchief perched like a corsage on one side. The menus all harked back to the comfort food of the South: Pig was the preeminent meat, and the pungent aroma of chitterlings often perfumed the kitchen. Pigs' feet were also offered, and great delight was taken in sucking the hot-sauce-dotted meat off the bones. Pork chops were cooked to a solid well-done and smothered with thick brown gravy. Side dishes included tender candied yams (yes, they were sweet potatoes), dripping with sugar and cinnamon in every bite. There were always greens-be they collards, turnips, or mustards or a mix of all three-handpicked over and freshly cooked. They were served with smoked pig or, in later years, a smoked turkey wing. Okra figured significantly on most menus, turning up in gumbo or served as stewed okra in a mix of tomato and onion or as Southern succotash with corn and tomatoes. For dessert, there was an array of the teeth-achingly sweet confections that had become hallmarks of African American food: bubbling cobblers filled with seasonal fruit, bread puddings, rice puddings with and without raisins, fluffy coconut cakes, densely rich pound cakes, yellow cakes with chocolate frosting, and more (though red velvet cake had not become ubiquitous at this point). Then there were the pies-flaky crusts made with lard topped by or underpinned with freshly made fillings: sweet potato pie, syrupy pecan pie, and nutmeg-scented apple pie. There was always rice in the kitchen to put under the rich cream gravy that accompanied the fried chicken, and the bread basket boasted fluffy squares of hot corn-bread and often hot biscuits. These places were also open for breakfast, and those fortunate enough to greet the day in them ate biscuits and syrup: karo, cane, or sorghum, and only occasionally maple. There were eggs aplenty done to order, sausage patties (not links), and South or North there were grits.

Some restaurants, like Atlanta's Deacon's and New York's Cope-land's, did not survive the late-twentieth-century changes in African American dietary and dining habits and the gentrification of their neighborhoods that later years would bring. Others, like Chicago's Army and Lou's, seem preserved in the amber of their times. Paschal's, though, had, like Atlanta, grown and prospered since my first visit. A recent trip to the city that I have come to understand and enjoy led me to stay in the hotel-restaurant complex that Paschal's has become. The rooms were motel minimalist, but the restaurant was trendy, popular, and the poster child for the New Atlanta: it displayed all the possibilities that exist there for those with gumption and nerve.

Paschal's and other places like it, South and North, were pivot points of history: places where black entrepreneurship met up with the growing national movement for Civil Rights for African Americans. They were hubs in vibrant African American communities. In the North, they were refuges for homesick expatriate black Southerners, places where those who had ridden the trains and walked the roads northward in search of better opportunities could gather and indulge their physical and psychic need for the food of their remembered Southern pasts. In the South, the restaurants were places where African Americans knew that they would be welcomed in the days when welcome was most a.s.suredly not offered by white establishments. In the 1950s and 1960s they became gathering places for dissent-places where the next chapter in the African American quest for full equality would be strategized and plotted, organized and launched. It is somehow fitting that so much of the organization of the Civil Rights Movement took place around tables in home kitchens and restaurants like Paschal's and others. After all, during the 350 -year-plus history of African Americans in this country, we were relegated to the kitchen and kept in actual or metaphorical servitude. The food that flourished in these restaurants during the 1960s and 1970s came to be known as soul food because it fed the spirit as much as the body on the long march to inst.i.tutionalized equality.

The die was cast when President Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948, toward the end of World War II. The postwar era in the United States was one of unprecedented optimism and growth for the middle cla.s.ses. Returning soldiers could take advantage of the G.I. Bill and get a subsidized education. Homes were being built in new suburbs and people were moving out from the cities. Affluence was all around. Supermarkets sprouted across the country; the aisles were filled with new products to go into the shiny refrigerators and freezers that many now acquired. Men got out their Hawaiian shirts and their ap.r.o.ns and headed to their newly acquired backyards to light up barbecue grills and indulge in another national fad. "Quick" and "convenient" were the watchwords of the day for the myriad American women who had gone into the job market to help the war effort and who did not return to their former role as tenders of home and hearth at its end. Products like Minute Rice, fish sticks, Lipton onion soup mix, and Betty Crocker and Pillsbury cake mixes proliferated on the shelves. Those who had seen the war in j.a.pan and Italy, France and the South Pacific, had also experienced different foods, and the national taste profile expanded. Hope seemed to be a glowing beacon on the horizon for many Americans, but not for African Americans.

For African American soldiers returning from the war, life was different. Some certainly were able to take advantage of the benefits the war had brought, but there was also a renewed sense of the urgent need for full equality. After all, they'd bandaged the wounded, fed the forces, helped on the home front in the armament factories and the naval yards; they'd done all the dirty work. The glorious Tuskegee Airmen had even guided American bombers to their destinations, never losing a plane. It was time for the country that had ignored or neglected them for generations to step up and finally make things equal. Returning black soldiers arrived home with a different att.i.tude toward the second-cla.s.s citizenship that had been their lot. Different racial att.i.tudes in Europe had also confirmed that the American way of life was not the only way. There was a better way to be, and it was time for the United States to understand that. African American soldiers were not coming home from the fronts to be shut out of the American dream once again.

Returning African American soldiers came back to a South that was rigidly segregated: education, housing, public accommodations, and dining were strictly delineated according to color. Jim Crow laws still affected Southern voters, making the disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt complete. In the North, an increasingly affluent white middle-cla.s.s population moved to the newly constructed suburbs. They left the Northern blacks-who had moved to the urban centers in search of jobs that were declining in a postwar economy-relegated to living in inner-city neighborhoods that were slumping into deterioration. Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka began a series of legal decisions that eradicated the Jim Crow laws and brought the possibility of full equality closer to reality. It declared, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision, followed in 1955 by another referred to as began a series of legal decisions that eradicated the Jim Crow laws and brought the possibility of full equality closer to reality. It declared, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The decision, followed in 1955 by another referred to as Brown II Brown II, mandated that the dismantling of the unequal school systems should begin with "all deliberate speed." Change was about to come to America.

After an initial brief period of calm, during which it looked as though the process might be attained through legislative means, the decisions were met with ma.s.sive resistance on the part of white Southern hard-liners, who were more than willing to fight to maintain the "Southern way of life." The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 defined in the minds of many African Americans north and south just what the "Southern way of life" had been for blacks for more than 350 years. The press for equality escalated. The Montgomery bus boycott brought Rosa Parks immortality and Martin Luther King Jr. fame and set the stage for and defined future protests. The increasing protests depended on highly organized black communities with capable and committed leaders. They were well orchestrated to not only attain small goals but also focus national attention on the South and on the need for racial equality in the country. Activists used a network of black churches. They also met at local black restaurants, like Atlanta's Paschal's and New Orleans's Dooky Chase, and in private homes, where they gathered around kitchen tables to strategize over platters of the traditional foods of the African American South-like fried chicken, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese-as they planned their campaigns.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a loose confederation of churches, community organizations, and civil rights groups, was formed, and it started to gain prominence and the support of liberal whites north and south. Soon it began to challenge the power of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the traditional black leadership organization, which had been instrumental in the pa.s.sing of the historic Brown Brown decisions in 1954. SCLC advanced the movement, but most important, SCLC began to train student activists on black college campuses in the South who provided the next wave of protest. This wave did not start at the kitchen tables or the black restaurants where King and his followers had planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, it started at the lunch counter of a five-and-dime store, where the menu ran to hamburgers and grilled cheese or chicken salad sandwiches. decisions in 1954. SCLC advanced the movement, but most important, SCLC began to train student activists on black college campuses in the South who provided the next wave of protest. This wave did not start at the kitchen tables or the black restaurants where King and his followers had planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, it started at the lunch counter of a five-and-dime store, where the menu ran to hamburgers and grilled cheese or chicken salad sandwiches.

This phase of the fight for equality began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, freshmen from North Carolina's Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), sat down at a Wool-worth's lunch counter at four thirty in the afternoon, requested service, and launched the sit-in movement that would become the tocsin tolling the death knell of the segregated South. The rules of social behavior in the segregated South were complex. Blacks were able to shop in the store and indeed had worked behind the lunch counter serving food; however, they were not able to sit down to eat at the establishment. That was about to change that afternoon when the four young men took their places and simply waited for service while doing their schoolwork. They were not served, although they waited until the shop's closing. The next day, others joined them: students from Bennett College, a black all-girls' school in Greensboro, as well as some whites from the University of North Carolina's Women's College. Although the four had begun their campaign without a mandate from any of the larger Civil Rights or community organizations, their protest quickly galvanized the area, and by the fifth day, there were hundreds of students crowded into the downtown shops, peacefully demanding their rights. The sit-ins galvanized the country, demonstrations were staged in more than one hundred cities in the South and the North, and the lunch counter rapidly became a national symbol of the South's inequalities.

The images of the well-dressed college students quietly sitting and the humiliations that they suffered as they remained impa.s.sive and dignified transformed the country, and the campaign soon spread nationwide. Blacks and whites in the North and West picketed large chains that had segregated facilities in the South, while in the South sit-ins spread rapidly to Nashville and Atlanta, where the campaign was broadened to include the desegregation of all public facilities as well as equal access to education and employment. The Greensboro protests ultimately resulted in the desegregation of that city's lunch counters. In Nashville, major restaurants desegregated by May 1960, and the Atlanta protests resulted in the capitulation of the local business and political community in September 1961.

Although many of the leaders of the developing protest movement had been trained in pa.s.sive resistance by traditional organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC, some younger activists feared that the momentum of the movement would fade. They called for continued nonviolent action but also acknowledged that more militancy might be required. A conference was called from April 15 to 17, 1960, to keep the protests moving forward. Addressing delegates who came from thirteen states and more than fifty different high schools and colleges, Ella Baker, a Shaw University student and an SCLC organizer, reminded them that it was about "more than a Hamburger"-an aptly culinary image for a movement that began with four young college students deciding to sit in for their lunch and their rights. The culture-changing protest was not about the mainstream food that was served at the lunch counters: the sixty-five-cent roast turkey, fifty-cent ham and cheese sandwich, or even about America's totemic apple pie, offered for fifteen cents. It was simply about equality. The sit-ins drew the curtain back from the country's dirty little secret and showed the inequality of American life to the world. Anyone alive during that era can vividly remember the images of the clean-cut young students, the unbridled furor of those who opposed them, and the victory the students won. Food became metaphor for society.

The Civil Rights organizations brought the movement to the daily consciousness of a nation, and gains were won. But it took the Freedom Riders; more boycotts; the murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; a march on Washington, D.C.; the bombing of four little girls in a Birmingham church; the a.s.sa.s.sination of President John F. Kennedy; and countless other acts of violence before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was pa.s.sed. The act banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and entertainment facilities, as well as schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and swimming pools. The 1964 act, unlike some that had preceded it, had potential for enforcement, since it mandated that government funds could be withheld from any program that did not comply. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to ensure that there was no longer discrimination in the country based on race, or on color, gender, religion, or country of national origin. The yoke had been lifted, but the battle for full equality was not over by any means.

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s was a crucial turning point in the history of African Americans and food: It not only emphasized the importance that food had held within the African American context but also placed the important role that African Americans played in the food of the country front and center. In a memorable photograph of the second day of the Greensboro sit-in, the four young men, Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond, sit at the counter. On the other side of the counter is a server, an African American who seems more than abashed to be placed in such a position. The menu offerings posted on the walls are the simple fast food of a prior generation: sandwiches, plate lunches, and sweet desserts, culinarily nothing worth fighting for. The story is a complex one, unlocking a history of racial interaction in the country. While many Southern whites were content with being served by African Americans who held the job of restaurant cook, home domestic, or lunch counterman, they were not prepared to share their s.p.a.ce at the counter or the table with those from whose hands they were served daily. The inherent absurdity of the racial contradiction that for centuries was emblematic of the South resonates in that photo capturing the era's transforming moment.

While the sit-ins were being held in the South, planning activities for civil disobedience around the country took African Americans and their food to a wider audience. Kitchen tables and black restaurants had become, along with churches of all denominations, traditional planning places for the movement. At them, white liberals from the North, who'd traveled to the South for sit-ins and later for Freedom Rides and voter registration and protest marches, got what for many was their first taste of the savory, well-seasoned traditional African American menu. When they returned home, they ventured into black neighborhoods in search of restaurants serving the same dishes and contributed to the mainstream awareness of the traditional black diet. The popularizing of African American traditional foods went hand in hand with a growing pride in race and in self in the African American community.

For the younger generation, the Civil Rights Movement morphed into the Black Power movement, and there was a growing pride in things black and in the culture that had survived enslavement. It went hand in hand with a hunger to learn more about the black experience and a national feeling of solidarity among blacks. In the early 1960s this pride manifested itself in what could be termed a "soul" movement. Much ink has flowed on the origins of the word "soul" as it applies to the African American experience in the United States, and more will almost certainly flow, but the 1960s created a place where for the first time in many lives there was a palpable pride in the uniqueness of the African American experience in the United States. The word "soul" was at first used among blacks to establish a cultural community, as in "soul brother" and "soul sister." It was initially used to denote kinship in the struggle, in much the same way as the terms "brother" and "sister" had been honorifics in the black church for generations. However, as with many other African American cultural innovations, the term was rapidly coopted by the mainstream, and soon there were soul combs on the market along with soul T-shirts, soul hairdos, soul handshakes, and certainly soul music. The term "soul food" harks back to this era, when everything that was black and of the moment had soul, and the word's use signaled a change in att.i.tude toward the food of the African American South.

Soul food has been defined as the traditional African American food of the South as it has been served in black homes and restaurants around the country, but there is wide-ranging disagreement on exactly what that food was. Was it solely the food of the plantation South that was fed to the enslaved: a diet of hog and hominy supplemented with whatever could be hunted or foraged or stolen to relieve its monotony? Was it the traditionally less-n.o.ble parts of the pig that were fed to the enslaved, like the chitterlings and hog maws and pigs' feet, the taste for which had been carried to the North by those who left the South in search of jobs? Was it the foods that nourished those who danced at rent parties in Harlem and who went to work in the armament factories during World War II? Was it the fried chicken that was served by the waiter-carriers who hawked their wares at train stations in Virginia or the chicken that was packed in boxes and nourished those who migrated to Kansas and other parts of the West? Was it the smothered pork chop that turned up in the African American restaurants covered in rich brown gravy or the fluffy cornbread that accompanied it?

Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual "How I Got Over," soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disen-franchis.e.m.e.nt of blacks in the United States. In the 1960s, as the history of African Americans began to be rewritten with pride instead of with the shame that had previously accompanied the experience of disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt and enslavement, soul food was as much an affirmation as a diet. Eating neckbones and chitterlings, turnip greens and fried chicken, became a political statement for many, and African American restaurants that had existed since the early part of the century were increasingly being patronized not only by blacks but also by those in sympathy with the movement. In the North, those who patronized soul food restaurants also included homesick white Southerners as well as the occasional white liberal who wanted a taste of some of the foods from below the Mason-Dixon Line.

As had often been the case in African American society, there was a culinary cla.s.s divide that must be acknowledged. At one pole were those whose social aspirations led them to eat dishes that emulated the dietary habits of mainstream America and Europe. At the other were those who consumed what was a more traditional African American diet: one that harked back to the slave foods of the South. In the 1960s, soul food based on the slave diet of hog and hominy became a political statement and was embraced by many middle-cla.s.s blacks who had previously publicly eschewed it as a relic of a slave past. It became popular and even celebrated.

A look at the cookbooks of the period confirms the enormous impact that the term had on the minds and indeed the palates of many. Most African American cookbooks published prior to the 1960s and in the early part of the decade referenced the plantation South or the historic aspect of the recipes with t.i.tles like Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women's (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women's Historical Cookbook of the American Negro Historical Cookbook of the American Negro. Others invoked the name of a well-known local cook or caterer, like Bess Grant's Cook Book Bess Grant's Cook Book, published in Culver City, California, and Lena Richard's eponymous cookbook, published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trend continued through the early 1960s, with such works as His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering, by Frank Bellamy of Roswell, Georgia, and A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins' Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, published in Annandale, Virginia.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, soul food had gained a powerful allure, and a tidal wave of cookbooks with "soul food" in the t.i.tle was unleashed, including Bob Jeffries's Soul Food Cookbook Soul Food Cookbook, Hattie Rinehart Griffin's Soul-Food Cookbook Soul-Food Cookbook, and Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan's Soul Food Cookbook Soul Food Cookbook-all published in 1969. The same year also saw the publication of Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook, by the owner of an East Village restaurant in New York City that had become a mecca for whites who wanted a taste of "authentic" African American cooking.

If the period of the Civil Rights movement began with traditional African American cookbooks extolling the virtues of greens, macaroni and cheese, neckbones, chitterlings, and fried chicken, it ended with a transformation of the diet of many African Americans. By the end of the decade and throughout the 1970s, brown rice, smoked turkey wings, tahini, and tofu also appeared on urban African American tables as signs of gastronomic protest against the traditional diet and its perceived limitations to health and well-being, both real or imagined. One of the reasons was the resurgence of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) originated in the early part of the twentieth century but came to national prominence in the 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that peaceful confrontation was not the only way. In Chicago, Detroit, and other large urban areas, the Nation of Islam offered an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement's civil disobedience, which many felt was unnecessarily docile. It preached an Afro-centric variation of traditional Islam and provided a family-centered culture in which gender roles were clearly defined. Food always played an important role in the work of the Nation. As early as 1945, the NOI had recognized the need for land ownership and also for economic independence and had purchased 145 acres in Michigan. Two years later, it opened a grocery store, a restaurant, and a bakery in Chicago. One of the major tenets of the religion was the eschewing of the behaviors that had been imposed by whites, who were regarded as "blue-eyed devils." Followers abjured their "slave name," frequently taking an X in its place and adopted a strictly regimented way of life that included giving up eating the traditional foods that were fed to the enslaved in the South.

NOI leader Elijah Muhammad was extremely concerned about the dietary habits of African Americans and in 1967 published a dietary manual for his followers t.i.tled How to Eat to Live; How to Eat to Live; in 1972 he published another, in 1972 he published another, How to Eat to Live, Book 2 How to Eat to Live, Book 2. As with much about the Nation of Islam, there is considerable contention about Muhammad's ideas and precepts, which are a combination of traditional Islamic proscriptions with an idiosyncratic admixture of prohibitions that seem personally biased. He vehemently opposed the traditional African American diet, or "slave diet," as he called it. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden to Nation of Islam members and pork, in particular, was anathema. Elijah Muhammad enjoined his followers: Do not eat the swine-do not even touch it. Just stop eating the swine flesh and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother's old fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15 minute biscuits made with baking powder. Put yeast in your bread and let it sour and rise and then bake it. Eat and drink to live not to die.

Pork is haram haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-n.o.ble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie-a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation's gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner.

Under Elijah Muhammad's leadership and that of his ministers Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam grew into a formidable force in the 1960s and 1970s, gaining numerous members around the country.

The mid-1960s were a time of turbulence and trouble on the national and international fronts. The 1963 a.s.sa.s.sination of President Kennedy opened a Pandora's box. In 1965, Malcolm X was a.s.sa.s.sinated and the Watts riots occurred. In 1967, Bobby Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated. In 1968, Martin Luther King was a.s.sa.s.sinated and riots broke out all over the country. The country's racial transformation occurred in an unprecedented clashing of blacks and whites, as blacks increasingly refused to accept what had for centuries been the status quo. A growing awareness of the history of African Americans and the race pride that was the result of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in a quest for more information about the African American experience and of blacks' links around the world with other communities in struggle.

As a result of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, there were a small but growing number of black students enrolled at predominantly white inst.i.tutions around the country. Their increasing numbers, which rose 100 percent between 1950 and 1969, led to the call for black studies, and in 1968, San Francisco State College became the first inst.i.tution of higher learning in the country to establish a black studies department. The inst.i.tutionalized study of the history of African Americans went hand in hand with the growth of a cultural nationalism movement that celebrated African American culture in all realms and contributed to an increasing awareness of an African world, as a greater number of African Americans began to have an international approach.

This international approach gained increasing importance as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Brown vs. Board of Education decision not only galvanized those in the United States but also served as a rallying cry to others around the world in countries where people of color were living under colonialism and imperialism. The battles won and the methods used in the United States provided a road map to independence for many. Indeed, many of those who became leaders in the independence movements in the Caribbean and on the African continent had been students in the United States. If the 1960 photograph of four young men sitting at a lunch counter sums up the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, a 1957 photograph of the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent dancing with a kente-cloth-clad Kwame Nkrumah at the independence celebrations for Ghana visually codified the opening of the African movement toward independence. decision not only galvanized those in the United States but also served as a rallying cry to others around the world in countries where people of color were living under colonialism and imperialism. The battles won and the methods used in the United States provided a road map to independence for many. Indeed, many of those who became leaders in the independence movements in the Caribbean and on the African continent had been students in the United States. If the 1960 photograph of four young men sitting at a lunch counter sums up the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, a 1957 photograph of the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent dancing with a kente-cloth-clad Kwame Nkrumah at the independence celebrations for Ghana visually codified the opening of the African movement toward independence.

Fights for basic civil rights in the United States paralleled those in the Caribbean and on the African continent, where the battle for autonomy and the ability to govern their own countries continued through the 1960s. The dates of independence for African and Caribbean nations resonate alongside the dates of gains in the march toward full equality for African Americans. The litany of independence days began with the 1957 independence for Ghana, the former British colony along the Gold Coast, and the turbulent 1958 independence of Guinea from France. The year 1960 marked a raft of independences for former French colonies, as Senegal, Ivory Coast, Chad, Gabon, Mali, Madagascar, Niger, Togo, Benin, and Upper Volta hauled down the tricolor and proudly hoisted their own flags. The same year, Nigeria gained independence from Britain. The map was gradually transformed from British imperial pink and French imperial turquoise into a raft of new nations. Africans, Caribbean peoples, and African Americans looked at one another across political divides and cultural contradictions and recognized that an international community was being born.

One of the ways that they all connected across cultural divide was food. As a growing number of cultural nationalists began to travel and visit other countries where people of African descent lived, they brought back recipes for dishes that were added to menus and to festivities. While the Harlem of the 1920s saw street vendors selling plantains and the root vegetables that are traditional in the foods of Africa and the Caribbean, in the intervening years they had largely disappeared from African American markets. By the 1960s, true yams, eddoes, tania eddoes, tania, and dasheen had been relegated to neighborhoods around the country with predominantly West Indian and African populations-neighborhoods that existed because the 1965 Immigration Act had relaxed quotas, opened the American borders to a wider number of immigrants, and allowed for greater immigration from far-reaching areas of the African world.

The mid-1960s were a time of increasing internationalism and growing awareness of self in the African American community. The creation of the holiday Kwanzaa by cultural nationalist and black studies advocate Ron "Maulana" Karenga in 1966 marked another turning point. Using a traditional East African harvest festival as inspiration, Karenga created a nonreligious seven-day celebration rich in ritual that's designed to uplift and unify African Americans. The year-end holiday is rooted in the nguzu saba nguzu saba, or seven principles, Karenga created to extol the virtues of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. In keeping with its Pan-African inspiration, Kwanzaa uses Swahili (the language of African unity) as its official language. There are no culinary expectations for the holiday, like the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas goose, but Kwanzaa's seven nights of ritual make symbolic use of food throughout: ears of Native American corn are placed on Kwanzaa tables to represent the children in each household, and a basket of fruit symbolizing abundance is an integral part of the traditional centerpiece.

The final day of Kwanzaa, which falls on New Year's Day, is given over to the Karamu festival and designed to celebrate African American communities past and present by honoring African American elders and community leaders as well as African and African American ancestors. The day is traditionally capped by a communal meal with people bringing dishes created from family recipes or foods from around the African Diaspora. Karenga's writings do not offer recipes, but dishes such as Kawaida rice, a vegetable-rich brown rice, became traditional to those who celebrated with him in the holiday's early years. Kwanzaa celebrations around the country include dishes from the African continent, the Caribbean region, and even South America, as well as sweet potato pie, fried chicken, greens, and other traditional specialties of the African American South.

Increasing numbers of African Americans chose to celebrate Kwanzaa in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a growing awareness of their own African roots. The Peace Corps and continuing missionary work by churches black and white sent African Americans to the African continent, resulting in more widespread knowledge of the African Diaspora and expanded gastronomic horizons, and contributed to a growing sense of shared culinary underpinning. In larger cities and college towns, dishes of West African jollof jollof rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites. rice and Ghanaian groundnut stew began to be found on dinner tables alongside more traditional favorites.

Then, in 1977, the publication of the autobiography of writer Alex Haley, Roots Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries based on it transformed the way many African Americans thought of themselves and of Africa. Blacks were galvanized by Roots Roots, and large numbers made pilgrimages to the African continent with hopes of discovering their own ancestral origins. (Coinciding with the release of the television miniseries, a travel organization began to offer trips to Dakar, Senegal, for $299, a price that was affordable for many who might otherwise never have traveled to the continent.) They boarded the planes by the hundreds and on the other side of the Atlantic found myriad connections between African American culture and that of the motherland. One major connection they discovered was West Africa's food. They visited markets and recognized items that had for centuries been a.s.sociated with African American life: okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. They tasted foods that had familiar savors and learned new ways to prepare staples of the African American diet like peanuts, hot chilies, and leafy greens. In Senegal, they tasted the onion-and-lemon-flavored chicken ya.s.sa ya.s.sa and the national rice-and-fish dish, and the national rice-and-fish dish, thieboudiennse; thieboudiennse; in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an in Ghana, they sampled spicy peanut stews; in Nigeria, they savored a black-eyed pea fritter called an akara akara. African Americans began to taste the culinary connections between foods they knew and those of the western section of the African continent.

This new knowledge found its way to a larger public, as the avant garde of African American cookbook authors took a more international approach and reflected a sense of the African Diaspora in their work. Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor, and The African Heritage Cookbook The African Heritage Cookbook, by Helen Mendes, look at the traditional foods not just of the American South but also of an international African culinary diaspora and contain recipes for dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean as well as traditional Southern ones.

Africa, its diaspora, and their foods, though, were only a part of the expanding African American culinary paradigm; cookbooks of the period also evidence wider-ranging African American att.i.tudes about what to eat and how to eat, like 1974's d.i.c.k Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature d.i.c.k Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature, by the eponymous comedian, and 1976's Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook, by Mary Keyes Burgess of Santa Barbara, California. The traditional foods of the South were still being written about in works like Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family, by Norma Jean and Carole Darden. Using genealogical research that had been popularized by Roots Roots as well as recipe and memoir, the Darden sisters crafted a 1978 cookbook that tells the story of their family through food. It also tells of the diversity of African American food. as well as recipe and memoir, the Darden sisters crafted a 1978 cookbook that tells the story of their family through food. It also tells of the diversity of African American food.

Up until the 1970s, the food of African Americans could be loosely categorized by cla.s.s. The upper cla.s.ses ate a more European-inspired diet, while the undercla.s.s consumed a diet evolved from the slave foods of the plantation South. Regional differences played a lesser role. The South always took primacy of place at the table, but those living in the North and West also had their own dietary habits, like a predilection for potatoes instead of rice or an affinity for beef instead of the more traditional pork.

The 1970s, however, exploded all hypotheses. Certainly many African Americans still clung to the traditional foods of the South. However, after the decades of Civil Rights gains and with the growing awareness of the African continent and its diaspora, increasing numbers of blacks of all cla.s.ses throughout the nation began eating a diet that was widely varied and reflected a newly discovered pride in African roots and international connections. The African American diet of this era was one that continued to celebrate the traditional foods; it also encompa.s.sed the vegetarianism espoused by d.i.c.k Gregory, allowed for the dietary concerns of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, reflected the international diversity of the African Diaspora, and even acknowledged the culinary trends of the time. In short, in the 1970s, the food of African Americans began to evolve into a cuisine that honored hog maws and collard greens and yet allowed for West African foufou, Caribbean callaloo, brown rice, and even tahini. Just as Rosa Parks's sitting down on a Montgomery bus changed the face of public America, civil rights workers at kitchen tables, black restaurants in urban enclaves, and four students at a North Carolina lunch counter transformed the African American foodscape and brought it out of isolation. Black food in its increasing diversity was no longer segregated on the blacks-only side of the menu, but squarely placed on the American table.

YOU WERE WHAT YOU ATE: FOOD AS POLITICS.

The 1970s were a time of political consciousness on all fronts. How one dressed-dashiki or three-piece suit or shirt jacket-subtly advertised a point of view. For women, long skirts or short, afro or straightened hair all took on great significance. How one ate was equally fraught with political subtext, and a meal with friends of differing political stripes could be transformed into a minefield of culinary dos and don'ts.

Members of the Nation of Islam were identified by their bow ties and their well-pressed suits. They were also recognized by their diet, which was without any hint of swine. It was a highly codified regimen with foods that, although they were considered healthier than the newly named "soul food," retained some aspects of the traditional African American taste profile-sugary desserts and well-cooked vegetables. There was no alcohol to be seen, and dessert was more often than not a bean pie-one of the religion's hallmarks.

Dashiki-clad cultural nationalists ate a diet that was multicultural and infused with international flavor. The calabashes and carved wooden bowls that appeared on their batik tablecloths were likely to be filled with dishes like the spicy jollof jollof rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as rice from western Africa, or the seafood-rich stew of leafy greens known as callaloo callaloo from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables. from the Caribbean, or a Louisiana file gumbo, or one of the newly created health-food-inspired dishes with a real or ersatz African name. Anything might turn up on their tables.

The upwardly mobile bourgeoisie continued to dine on Eurocentric foods and to emulate the culinary styles that James Beard, Julia Child, and Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, were bringing to the television sets weekly. Beef bourguignonne, beef Wellington, and cheese fondue were party standbys. In the privacy of their homes or those of their friends, they might indulge in some chitterlings or a slice of watermelon, but unless done to evidence culinary solidarity with others, it was not their public position.

The cla.s.sic foods of the African American South-stewed okra and b.u.t.ter beans, pork chops and fried chicken-maintained their place at the table as well. These were the foods of rural Southerners and those Northerners and activists who wished to signal their solidarity with the more traditional arm of the Civil Rights Movement. For some, they remained the daily dietary mainstays; but for most, they evolved into the celebration food of family reunions and Sunday dinners.

Those with no special allegiance to any one faction ate what they wished or whatever was placed in front of them. Their tables might groan under a meal of Southern fried chicken and Caribbean rice and peas or be set with the finest family china upon which would be placed chitterlings and a mess of greens. The gastronomically flexible developed a chameleonlike ability to change with the prevailing culinary trend and political view.

By the end of the 1970s, food, like all aspects of African American life, had become a battleground for ident.i.ty. The period's multiplicity of gastronomic and political positions and their dietary

CHAPTER 10.

WE ARE THE WORLD.

Making It in an Expanding Black World and Joining an Unbroken African Culinary Circle

Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York- I have lived in this neighborhood for more than twenty years. Labeled one of the country's African American ghettos in the turbulent 1960s, Bedford Stuyvesant benefited from an infusion of money and interest generated by Bobby Kennedy's championing of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which boosted African American home ownership and encouraged black enterprise in the community. I arrived a decade or so too late for the first wave of subsidized housing and the community spirit that it engendered; I was lured from my Greenwich Village apartment and my "That Girl" urban life by a brick row house. With a unique open floor plan and ample room for entertaining, the house struck me as a quirky place with loads of room for my thousands of cookbooks and my ever-growing collections. The neighborhood was in transition, but I hoped that with my "protective coloration" I'd be able to navigate the changes from Manhattan living without too much difficulty.

Little did I realize that I was spoiled. By the time I made my transition to Brooklyn life, I had written two cookbooks and was a food lover of the first order. I, like many other foodies-as we would later be called-had my culinary epiphany in France, where I'd lived for two years. In the Village, I was used to the abundant fresh produce at Balducci's, around the corner from my apartment, and the meat counter at Jefferson Market, which was a bit beyond that, as well as the atmospheric French butcher shop on my corner that sold tiny lamb chops and beautiful packages of freshly made pate and seemed transported from the Left Bank.

In my new neighborhood supermarket, I was confronted by less-than-pristine vegetables, and mainly the basics-greens, turnips, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and onions. There were no mushrooms, no fancy lettuces, no haricots verts. Salad meant iceberg lettuce, and for fruit I had a choice among apples, bananas, oranges, and the occasional pitiful-looking pear. Gone were seasonal treats like fresh raspberries in the summer and asparagus in the spring. (I knew better than to even think I'd spot a fiddlehead fern or a Jerusalem artichoke.) The meat counter was equally disappointing: There mostly were pork and chicken products and steaks that always seemed to be too thinly sliced. There was no lamb in sight, but customers were offered instead an a.s.sortment of nitrite-filled prepackaged luncheon meats. There were aisles and aisles of canned vegetables, packaged foods, sugary cereals, and fruit drinks containing little fruit juice. The real surprise was that the food cost as much or more than it did in the finest shops in Manhattan! The restaurant options were equally limited. Yes, the fish market offered delicious fried-fish sandwiches and there was a West Indian deli, but aside from Chinese takeout, there were three possibilities: McDonald's, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was my first real acquaintance with America's culinary apartheid. Long before the term "food justice" became common currency, I rapidly learned that African Americans and indeed all who shop in ghettoized areas out of the mainstream were being offered second-rate comestibles sold at first-cla.s.s prices and fast-foot joints. We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats, and second-or third-rate produce. It was a lesson I will not forget.

However, it was not all grim; there were advantages to Bed Stuy as well. I was heartened by the families who lived next door and the villagelike atmosphere on Fulton Street, two blocks away. I liked the fact that on summer weekends a gentleman would park his car across from my house, open the trunk, and sell watermelons; and I loved his sign, which read WATERMELON SWEET LIKE YOUR WOMAN. WATERMELON SWEET LIKE YOUR WOMAN.It was a place that reminded me of the 1950s, when I'd grown up, more than the 1980s.

When I lived in the Village, I had to journey uptown to Harlem whenever I felt like some collard greens or when I wanted black-eyed peas for the Hoppin' John deemed necessary to start the New Year off right, not only by me but also by most of Harlem, black Americans everywhere, and many white Southerners. In Brooklyn, there was no such difficulty; my local supermarket sold these African American staples year-round, and the greengrocer offered African American Southern seasonal specialties like raw peanuts. What the greengrocers lacked could be found on the back of trucks parked on Atlantic Avenue, where enterprising men hauled sausages, greens, sweet potatoes, and more up from North Carolina and did thriving business selling to those who still craved the foods of their Southern homes. The neighborhood was also home to a large West Indian population, so alongside the basic American produce, the local greengrocer also had dasheen, plantains, mangoes (in season), and a wide variety of root vegetables -eddoes -eddoes, yams, ca.s.sava-as well as shelves of Trinidadian curry powder, Barbadian brown sugar, and vats of salted codfish and pickled pigs' tails. There were small containers at the checkout counter filled with the fresh thyme sprigs and the Scotch bonnet chilies that are essential to much of the food of the Caribbean world. What was exotic in other parts of the city became everyday for me.

In the twenty-plus years I've lived in my neighborhood, I have watched as the place and my supermarket changed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, my neighborhood has gentrified but not so much that it's not still an African American neighborhood-at least for the next few years. The foodscape, however, is evolving rapidly. I can now get Chinese, Indian, and j.a.panese food delivered. A burgeoning Senegalese neighborhood has grown up around a mosque and is home to several small restaurants selling thieboudi-enne thieboudi-enne and chicken ya.s.sa to taxi drivers and adventurous locals. Folks even proudly boast of the Applebee's restaurant that opened a few years back. My supermarket as well has taken on a new look. The abundance of pork and chicken products is still there, as are the thin steaks, but the new dietary habits of African Americans and the upward mobility of the neighborhood are reflected in the goods sold. The produce counter now offers an abundance of fresh salads: arugula, mesclun, baby spinach, and spring mixes alongside the collards, dasheen, and kale. I can even find sun-dried tomatoes and haricots verts. A bakery purveys freshly baked croissants and pound cakes as well as bagels. I can find flour tortillas and wraps for spring rolls as well as wheatgra.s.s health potions and tahini. The shelves still have their sugary cereals and canned foods, but they also display Greek yogurt, soy milk, and even tofu. and chicken ya.s.sa to taxi drivers and adventurous locals. Folks even proudly boast of the Applebee's restaurant that opened a few years back. My supermarket as well has taken on a new look. The abundance of pork and chicken products is still there, as are the thin steaks, but the new dietary habits of African Americans and the upward mobility of the neighborhood are reflected in the goods sold. The produce counter now offers an abundance of fresh salads: arugula, mesclun, baby spinach, and spring mixes alongside the collards, dasheen, and kale. I can even find sun-dried tomatoes and haricots verts. A bakery purveys freshly baked croissants and pound cakes as well as bagels. I can find flour tortillas and wraps for spring rolls as well as wheatgra.s.s health potions and tahini. The shelves still have their sugary cereals and canned foods, but they also display Greek yogurt, soy milk, and even tofu.

The changes in my neighborhood supermarket reflect, more than anything, the transformation of the African American diet in the final years of the twentieth century and the opening ones of the twenty-first. The traditional Southern diet of pig and corn is still consumed, but increasingly it has become celebration food for many families, eaten only on Sundays, on holidays, and at family reunions. The black middle cla.s.s continues to increase, and upwardly mobile African Americans eat more widely ranging foods. The culinary explorations of the 1960s have added dishes from the African continent and the Caribbean to the menu.

There has also been an expansion of the black world. The designation "black American" no longer means up from the South. It can also encompa.s.s folks from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the African continent itself. All brought recipes from their homelands to enrich the mix. These dishes supplemented the traditional Southern specialties and the recipes that blacks and the rest of the country received weekly from television shows with stars like Julia Child and Graham Kerr. At an African American party today it is possible to find the fried bean fritters from Brazil known as acaraje acaraje served along with Jamaican meat patties or the Trinida-dian roasted chickpeas called served along with Jamaican meat patties or the Trinida-dian roasted chickpeas called channa channa that originated in India or, yes, fried chicken and a mess of greens. Beverages might include Senegalese that originated in India or, yes, fried chicken and a mess of greens. Beverages might include Senegalese bissap rouge bissap rouge, Southern mint julep featuring top-shelf bourbon, Guyanese rum and ginger ale, or a mellow California merlot. The choices and the range of food are limited only by the imagination. At the dinner table in the twenty-first century, African Americans, like the rest the country, are culinary omnivores, and we can truly say that, on the table, we eat the world.

By the end of the 1970s it seemed as though the major battles engaged for centuries were winding down, if not completely won, and that the seeds of full equality long planted had finally sprouted. Black people had moved forward, but there were still hurdles to surmount and gains to be made. Despite their conservative agendas, President Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, placed blacks in their administration's in high positions. Blacks continued to make political gains on the local and state levels as well. In 1964, there were only 103 black elected officials nationwide; by 1994, there were nearly 8,500, and blacks were mayors of four hundred U.S. cities, including New York and Washington, D.C. Political activist Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 on a platform that united the concerns of blacks with those of poor whites and other minorities. His Rainbow Coalition was built on gra.s.sroots strategies he learned working with Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement. He lost in 1984, but made a decent showing, and when he ran for president a second time, in 1987, he garnered one third of all the votes cast in the Democratic presidential primaries.

Black gains were not just on the political front. African Americans made strides in business, in sports, and in many other fields of endeavor. Black magazines like Essence Essence and and Black Enterprise Black Enterprise followed the trail blazed by John Johnson and counterpointed the other publications' headlines about unemployment and familial dysfunction by presenting successful blacks from all walks of life to readers both black and white. They offered articles on the new entrepreneurship, book reviews, social commentary, in-depth interviews of black writers, artists, and businesspeople, as well as sections on travel and on wine and food. The latter were obligatory, for the country had changed as well. In the 1960s it underwent a culinary revolution with television chefs like James Beard and Julia Child. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, food had become one of the country's central cultural forces. followed the trail blazed by John Johnson and counterpointed the other publications' headlines about unemployment and familial dysfunction by presenting successful blacks from all walks of life to readers both black and white. They offered articles on the new entrepreneurship, book reviews, social commentary, in-depth interviews of black writers, artists, and businesspeople, as well as sections on travel and on wine and food. The latter were obligatory, for the country had changed as well. In the 1960s it underwent a culinary revolution with television chefs like James Beard and Julia Child. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, food had become one of the country's central cultural forces.

Ironically, the food that was increasingly on the country's mind was for the most part neither fresh nor always nourishing; it was readily available and cheap. As women joined the workplace in record numbers in this period, food became a matter of convenience. Breakfast could be purchased at McDonald's, lunch at Burger King, and dinner brought home from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Family life also changed in the 1980s, and increasingly Americans lived in single-family households that survived on processed or fast foods. Even in households where the nuclear family still held sway, family dinnertime was becoming a thing of the past. Differing household schedules meant that individuals grabbed whatever they could and ate on their own timetable while watching television or chatting on the telephone or engaged in other pursuits. Often what they grabbed was fast food; in 1993 alone, Americans ate twenty-nine billion hamburgers! Fast-food chains expanded, as did the waistlines of average Americans. Obesity, not surprisingly, became a growing concern of the supersized country, and reports from the American Medical a.s.sociation regarding cholesterol levels and the health hazards of eating junk food raised alarm. The poor and the working cla.s.ses, like those in my Brooklyn neighborhood, were growing fat and unhealthy on genetically engineered foods, processed foods, and fast-food meals.

On the other side of the culinary divide, the country's elite celebrated with lavish meals in over-the-top restaurants, which proliferated. Wealthy diners around the country savored a new American cuisine inspired by regional dishes. America became one of the world's dining destinations, with San Francisco and New York City developing into much-visited dining meccas. New American cuisine became the watchword, and American chefs like Larry Forgione in New York, Jasper White in Boston, Mark Miller in Santa Fe, and Alice Waters in Berkeley, California, championed the flavors of the country's regional cuisines. They served them up to the top tier of the public in a nation that spent almost one third of its food dollars on restaurant meals, whether upscale or down. Those who only watched the lifestyles of the rich and famous on their television sets attempted to duplicate the same meals in increasingly elaborate home kitchens using one of the thousand cookbooks that were published every year. Others simply sat down in front of their television sets, tuned into one of the rapidly multiplying cooking shows, and munched away on their hamburgers or Kentucky Fried while dreaming of other fare.

Americans on all ends of the social spectrum became enthralled by a cadre of celebrity chefs: cooks who made fortunes from food. However, African Americans who had toiled in homes and restaurants since the origins of the country were once again on the fringes of the new bonanza. One who almost made it was an earnest twenty-five-year-old black chef who created nouvelle cuisine dishes at a downtown Manhattan bistro known as Odeon. Patrick Clark came to popular attention in the 1980s. He was fiercely dedicated to his profession and wildly enthusiastic; with the zeal and wonder of the youngster he was, he could and did talk about his culinary ideas for hours.

Clark was a second-generation chef whose father had cooked for the Restaurant a.s.sociates group in an era when blacks worked hard but garnered little fame. At home, he'd grown up on traditional Southern specialties like smothered pork chops and fried chicken, but he also had been introduced to more-omnivorous fare through his father's profession. He trained at New York City Technical College and apprenticed at Eugenie-les-Bains, France, under Michel Guerard, one of the originators of cuisine minceur cuisine minceur (the diet branch of nouvelle cuisine). As a cla.s.sically trained black chef with an exceptional culinary pedigree, he was poised to enjoy the benefits of fame and fortune. (the diet branch of nouvelle cuisine). As a cla.s.sically trained black chef with an exceptional culinary pedigree, he was poised to enjoy the benefits of fame and fortune.

Clark arrived on the New York restaurant scene when fine dining was the social pastime of the well-to do and the city abounded with pricey restaurants purveying all manner of food. In Odeon's first review he was awarded two stars by the New York Times New York Times. He soon became one of the city's most revered chefs and expanded his culinary repertoire subtly, adding some of the Southern tastes of his African American world to the regional cuisines of America that were being rediscovered by chefs around the country. Clark's culinary realm grew, and by the mid-1980s he was appointed chef at Cafe Luxembourg, a second restaurant opened by Odeon owner Keith McNally.

Although lauded by hi