The chef's latest cookbook, out this week, “highlights Africa's gifts to the world, through people and food."
Photo: Bea Da Costa
By Arati Menon
“As far back as I can remember, I knew I was different,” says Alexander Smalls. Growing up in a Gullah Geechee household in Spartanburg, North Carolina, the chef says he recognized the implication of those differences—in appearance, history, and cuisine. “I discovered early that my friends did not eat any of the foods that I ate. My foods were more akin to West Africa, you know, and very much pronounced in that way,” he says. It wan't until he moved to New York as an adult, that he assimilated the value of that diasporic connective tissue. “Food was a big part of cultural expression and identity of the African diaspora,” he says.
Over the last three decades, the chef and restaurateur has traveled the world studying the foodways and culinary techniques of the African diaspora. Along the way, he has written award-winning books and opened several restaurants in New York, including Café Beulah, which featured South Carolina Lowcountry fare and a Southern-style bakery named Sweet Ophelia’s. When, in 2013, Smalls opened The Cecil on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, an Esquire article named it the “Best New Restaurant in America,” described as thrilling and unique: "… primed and loaded with the flavors of the African diaspora … a trail of taste that moved from West Africa to India, the Caribbean to America to China, and then back again."
The Contemporary African Kitchen includes 120 recipes from the most relevant voices in the contemporary African culinary landscape. Photo: Phaidon Press Ltd.
It's easy to forget that in a past life Smalls was also a Grammy- and Tony Award-winning opera singer.
Now in his third act, and after decades of giving African diaspora cuisine a voice in the global culinary scene, Smalls is going straight to the source of his inquiry. On October 15, Smalls’ latest book The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa, which he co-wrote with Nina Oduru, a DC-based inclusion specialist and writer, hit shelves. With 120 recipes from the most relevant voices in food, the cookbook takes readers on a soaring journey across the continent—from the shores of Alexandria to the hustle and bustle of Rwanda, and the mountains of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Featuring dishes like Mohamed Kamal’s ‘Land of Gold’ sheerya, a cherished Nubian breakfast, and Pierre Thiam’s chicken cassava leaf and peanut butter stew from Casamance in southern Senegal, the recipes are soaked in history yet contemporary in flair. Some stories that accompany them are personal: Mostafa Seif's Egyptian okra stew reminds him of his mother's balcony where she'd hang-dry the vegetable as her way of showing off their lushness to neighbors. Others underline the interconnectedness of history and culture, like Zein Abdullah's chicken biryani which celebrates the prevalent Swahili culture that runs up and down the East Coast of Africa—and Arab influences on African cuisine. All of the recipes celebrate the bounty of the continent's forests, farms, and seas. “For too long, we have devalued things that are African, not allowing them to exist in the more modern conversation around excellence," says Smalls. This book, he hopes, will change that.
You’ve written books before about African American food and the African diaspora, but this cookbook goes right to the source, to the motherland. Tell us what that meant to you.
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The short answer is that I wrote this book because the celebration of the culinary expression of the African diaspora, the African continent, really has been delayed in our society. And I felt like I had to live what I wanted to talk about. But the truth is that this has been a journey. It started for me as a young boy in South Carolina, growing up in a Gullah Geechee environment when I discovered that my friends did not eat any of the foods that I ate. Then in the 70s, when I was traveling all over Europe, as an opera singer and eating at the finest restaurants, I was seeing that somehow we were being told that my grandmother's brown-pan gravy was somehow worse for me, for us, than a French grandmother's heavy cream gravy. So, you know, we have had to rise up from connotation that our food was bad for you. It was years later, when I set out to open the first fine-dining African American concept in New York City in the '90s, that I decided it was time to debunk the myth that we did not belong in the conversation of excellent cooking. At Cafe Beulah, I created a deconstructed gumbo that cost $40 in a Black-owned restaurant. People lost their minds.
Chef and restaurateur Alexander Smalls wrote The Contemporary African Kitchen with Nina Oduru, a DC-based culinary inclusion specialist. Photo: Rich Kissi/Phaidon Press Ltd.
I then took a 10-year hiatus to travel the world following the footprint of enslaved people, across the Atlantic, down to Brazil and Colombia, even China, Europe, and when I returned I created this concept called Afro-Asian-American cooking, which mirrored African enslaved people’s presence on five continents. That resulted in a restaurant called Cecil in 2013, which was named “Best New Restaurant in America” by Esquire magazine, the first time a Black-owned restaurant had taken such title. I’m skipping over time but you know, my intention was to break the myth that African American food was not sophisticated. During the pandemic, I wanted to go a step further, so I opened the world’s first African dining hall in Dubai—22,000 square feet with 13 different concepts representing the best food of the continent. I started by creating every concept [myself], every recipe, but then I came to my senses, because I thought: How dare I be so presumptuous and think I could just move the needle forward on my own? So I scratched everything, and I went to Africa and found the best chefs and brought them to Dubai to contribute. So I had a village, and that taught me how to put this book together. The book really came out of this entire journey. I've been getting here now for over 35 years.
You followed a similar approach with the book: you've gathered the most relevant voices in the African food landscape—chefs and culinary custodians—to spotlight its richness and diversity. And in doing that you've broken another assumption, of African cuisine being this monolith…
You just said something that's very important, you know, because people think of Africa as monolithic. It’s a continent made up of 55 countries, and they are diverse but they are also sort of infused and spiced with their history of colonialism. African food in Senegal has French inspiration and connotations, and you can go down to, you know, Mozambique and have all these different Portuguese influences and so on. But essentially, I see the book as giving birth to a movement in which African chefs, scholars, and influencers are global participants in the conversation around bringing Africa forward through its pots and pans. They have taken the pot out of the backyard, if you will, and brought it inside, to elaborate soirees and tables and interpretations. Food is like poetry. It has lyricism. It's so adaptable and so available to express the consciousness of a culture—much like art is. We turn to artists to tell us where we are, who we are, how we're doing. The public has to understand that food is an art, too, and each chef is a new artist, an interpreter of their stories in their environment, because real food is about cooking who you are. African chefs are now bringing Africa into the conversation in an extraordinary way. There's so many new Michelin star-winning African chefs populating the landscape of Europe and America, but the idea with this book was to make it about leading chefs in Africa.
An okra stew from chef Mostafa Seif, a prominent voice in New Egyptian cuisine. Photo: Bea Da Costa/Phaidon Press Ltd.
You speak a lot about the influence of growing up in a Gullah Geechee community and your South Carolina heritage. Were there any aha moments for you with this book that revealed more about your own roots than you were expecting?
I think that all of this came out of the fact that I was desperately looking for parts of my own life. I had a grandfather who spoke Gullah Geechee and sounded like someone coming out of Ghana or the Atlantic coast of Africa. And so I think what happened for me was a revelation about how I was able to identify with so much of what I uncovered: jollof rice in Ghana was my grandpa's red rice in Charleston. It's the same dish. And it's the same dish of jollof rice in Nigeria and Senegal. The gumbo I ate was basically the same as the okra and fish stew, you know. I was fortunate enough to come out of that West African engagement in Charleston, and so there were aha moments for me everywhere. The peanut butter that's put in the maafe in Senegal is peanut soup that's thicker; the cassava in these dishes was like my yams, and on and on and on.
Why is food such an important cultural marker for the African diaspora?
Enslaved Africans were not allowed to read and write, and therefore our history had to be oral, had to be performed. It had to be told through stories, songs, and our recipes, our food. Those were the languages we spoke. I often tell people that for African Americans, African people of the diaspora, food is currency. We spend it like our wealth, our health. When we did not own ourselves, we owned that dish we made. We owned that song we sang. So that food became not only a source of representation, but pride, dignity, you know, and how we could love each other—because we had no money.
Is there a particular dish in the book that’s a favorite—one you find yourself cooking again and again?
I have to say up front that I have no favorite children. But there was a dish that reminded me most of my childhood. It's Agness Colley’s shrimp stew from Togo, which the chef makes for special occasions and holidays, and it reminds me of my father. My father only made one dish in my house growing up—it was shrimp and crab meat gravy served over grits. I use rice grits in honor of my father, even though my father used regular grits from corn. Rice grits are like broken rice from Senegal that's been broken even more so when you cook it, it's like a porridge. But that dish, because that dish for me was for special occasions, reminds me of my childhood.
Of the places featured in the book, is there one that you can’t wait to return to?
Rwanda. A chef, a good friend of mine, has done some extraordinary things with food with his restaurant in Kigali. His name is Dieuveil Malonga and he cut his teeth in the top European restaurants—he cooks on an extraordinary level of excellence. He is such a brilliant young chef, working with incredible ingredients and cuisines within Africa. He contributed to the book, but I haven’t been to Meza Malonga yet. There’s just a lot of great energy in Kigali, even in the art world—I bought a beautiful painting on my last visit by an artist named Emmanuel Nikuranga that has this Jasper Johns-like feel to it. Did you know three-fourths of the population of Rwanda is under 35? So there's just a lot of energy. I call it the Black Switzerland because it's so clean. And the people are so warm and they have a great sense of community. It’s a delightful place.
Can we talk a bit about Harlem? It’s where you started restaurants, based a book called Between Harlen and Heaven, and built a community—but I've heard you describe it as where you feel most at home.
Interestingly enough, I think my destination when I first got to know New York in the 1970s was always Harlem. And I tell you this, because when I was a little kid, about maybe five or six, my parents packed my sisters and I off with my grandparents, who were driving to New York from South Carolina, which was common because, you know, they grew up in the Jim Crow era, and the only real way to have your dignity back was to drive your car and be able to control that part of your life. So we piled into the backseat along with our packed shoebox lunches, which were how Black folks ate when they traveled because they couldn't go to a restaurant, so they would take shoe boxes and wrap food in wax paper and tie it with twine. My third restaurant, Shoebox Cafe in Grand Central Terminal, was an homage to the shoebox lunch. Anyway, when we finally got to Harlem it was about midnight. I remember how loud the streets were and I was fascinated. I came from the countryside where all you heard crickets, and here I heard people laughing, dancing in the streets. My father always told amazing stories about his time spent in Harlem after World War II, and there I was in this place, this Mecca that he talked and sang about in his beautiful voice. I stayed up the whole night because I was so excited.
When I moved back to New York as a young opera singer, I was living on the Upper West Side, but I’d come up on weekends to go to the markets in Harlem because I missed southern markets. People would drive trucks of vegetables in, because Harlem was a food desert. And people with trucks from South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, full of fresh produce, would come park on the avenues on weekends, and people would buy off these trucks. But at this point, I was an opera singer; I was not thinking about being a chef. I was just someone who wanted the cultural connection with food and the people, because Black folks there were all basically southern Black folks who had migrated. Eventually, after closing my third restaurant [downtown], I made my way to Harlem, moved to the top floor of a friend’s brownstone, and created a life for myself amid the diaspora. Later, Dick Parsons, the former Time Warner chief executive and an old friend, and I got together and opened The Cecil and reopened Minton's Playhouse, and that became the foundational piece of my culinary expression in this community that I love. I still live on Striver’s Row and host dinner salons at my house.
A celebratory shrimp stew from Togolese chef Agness Colley. Photo: Bea Da Costa/Phaidon Press Ltd.
Your dinner parties are the stuff of legend. What's on your table when you call people over?
We may start off with a salad or a soup, or something like that that may be plated, but you will always find a pot on my table—there's something so ritualistic about bringing the most extraordinary dish in its cooking pot to the table. I love eating family-style because I want the food to be moving around. I want it to be a reason for you to speak to your neighbor. I grew up having meals with my family at a table; a lot of my friends didn't have those experiences. We had to be home for dinner. Once my father got in that house, you needed to appear within 20 minutes no matter what you were doing. And you were not allowed to miss grace. He’d say: What happens after grace is between you and God. I wrote a book about this called When Alexander Graced the Table.
What’s for dessert?
Oh, my God, you know I love pies. I'm not a baker, and the reason being is that I don't like food that doesn't need me. I mean, it's not fun to bake because you just let it sit in the oven. I need a pot. I need a spoon. I need fire, and I need to be a part of that dish, period. Baking is like, nope I don’t need you; just take me out when I’m ready. But pies, I bake. Pies don’t turn on you like cakes do. But pies probably go back to my childhood: my grandmother used to make a lot of them. I'm famous for my pecan pies, but I do some with chocolate or with caramel. I even do a pecan pumpkin sweet potato pie. My new one is black walnut pie—oh it's just wonderful. Isn’t there something so lovely about saying: look, I brought you a pie.
Read the original article on Conde Nast Traveler.
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