Kwame Onwuachi has been busy. In June he was on Late Night With Seth Meyers cooking an admirably legit crawfish boil—corn on the cob, newspapered tables, wriggly critters, and all. A month prior, he published his first cookbook, My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef (our current Saveur Cookbook Club pick), which came on the heels of his award-winning novel, Notes From a Young Black Chef, out just a year before that. 

Between books, Onwuachi has managed to release a nail polish line with ORLY, host the James Beard Awards in Chicago, and seal the deal on a biopic portraying his life. So when a rare window opened up in Onwuachi’s agenda, we pounced at the opportunity to take stock of his trajectory. Here’s our interview.

What inspired you to write this book?

It’s every chef’s dream to have their own cookbook. I wanted to document the dishes that make me who I am, that tell my version of America. Everyone who grew up here has their own version, and this is mine. 

What surprised you most in your research?

The pantry. I guess I hadn’t realized that to do these recipes right, you need an arsenal of sauces and spices and marinades. That’s why there’s a section on them in the front of the book. 

What sauce or spice blend do you reach for the most?

My magic bullet is ginger-garlic purée. It goes good in everything. I use it to bump up a lot of dishes. You can rub it on a steak and sear it and have yourself a good time. The other thing is house spice, my blend that’s a match made in heaven. It’s my mom’s recipe. We grew up using it in lieu of salt. 

How did you choose what recipes to include?

I just listed everything I grew up eating and then wrote the recipes the way I would make them.  My father is Nigerian and Jamaican and my mother Trinidadian and Creole, so there was a lot to work with. 

What dishes in the book do you cook over and over?

Jerk chicken. It’s in-depth but it’s the most flavorful thing ever. When you make really good jerk, you understand why it’s a worldwide phenomenon. My recipe is all about attention to detail: the brine, the homemade marinade, pimento wood—these are the things that can make jerk extremely special. 

What ingredient are you most excited about right now?

Honestly? Rice [laughing]. I want it with every meal. White or joloff or fried or Mexican—rice is just it for me.

Beyond your family, what influences your cooking? 

I’m still figuring that out. I recently got into acting. I used to act when i was a kid, but I forgot about it. I’m taking acting classes to see what’ll happen. Acting—why not? We are humans on this earth for a short time. Traveling has also been important.

Tell me more about that. 

Food can be a love language. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You can connect with someone and learn about their culture and who they are by sitting down and breaking bread. I remember this lady in Thailand. I was walking past, and she was eating these clams with some type of sauce and I wanted to ask what was in them. She didn’t speak English but just offered her food to me. Sometimes you don’t need language.

Your book illustrates the extraordinary range and richness of Black food. Do you feel that anything is missing from the current conversation?

You can’t talk about American cuisine without talking about West African food. When enslaved people came here, their food came with them. American food is West African food. Jollof rice became jambalaya. Suya became barbecue. Watermelon, rice, bene seeds, okra—all of these ingredients came straight from West Africa and are the fabric of America’s culinary DNA.

Why are so many Americans unaware of those roots?

A lot of erasure of Black identity was intentional. But this book is helping to bring these things back to life.

What’s next for you, chef?

I’ve got a movie coming out. A movie about my life that starts filming soon. And you can find me in August at The Family Reunion, a Black food festival in Middleburg, Virginia.

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Deviled crab is best when you clean and cook the fresh-caught crab yourself. Remove the flesh from their shells, then season the meat with ingredients like lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Then, you’ll spoon the mixture back into the shells for a final cook to slightly crisp the meat. (You can use prepared crab meat from the store, just make sure to also buy large crab backs to hold the meat mixture.) Don’t be shy with the filling—you want that deviled crab to be overflowing so it’s a real treat for guests. The Worcestershire sauce adds a light, tangy flavor, and the breadcrumbs introduce a subtle crunch that, when combined with the crab mixture, will take you back to memories of a sunny, sandy beach in the Lowcountry.

Adapted from the new book Gullah Geechee Homecooking: Recipes from The Matriarch of Edisto Island, by Emily Meggett, published by Abrams. Text © 2022 Emily Meggett.

Featured in “This Matriarch of Gullah Geechee Food Has Been Cooking Farm-To-Table For Decades.”

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An overwhelming 30-foot technicolor tapestry of solid colors and patterned blocks greets guests as they enter the Museum of Food and Drink (MoFaD). It is a quilt portraying some of the names, places, and faces that have contributed to the story this exhibit tells. The images depicted in each square, crafted by visual graphics artist Adrian Franks, vary from portraits of historical figures to darkened silhouettes, close-ups of ingredients, and even location names. Made up of 400 individual tiles, this quilt was created by Harlem Needle Arts, a collective focused on educating and preserving textile traditions throughout the African diaspora and highlighting innovators in African American cuisine both past and present. It’s a fitting entry into the museum’s new exhibit, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.”

This month, MoFaD debuts its latest exhibit to the public, using a gallery space at the Africa Center in Harlem to honor the influence African Americans have had on America’s culinary history. James Beard Award-winning historian and author Jessica B. Harris led the development of this exhibit, bringing together a collection of artifacts, art, music, a chef-curated lunch, and a pop-up bookstore demonstrating and documenting the importance of African American contributions to the country’s foodways. “African Americans have had a substantial role in what we think of as American food,” says Harris. 

The quilt is one of the exhibit’s many visual metaphors that illustrate how countless people have contributed to this legacy over the course of hundreds of years. Just as individual squares collectively create a finished quilt, African American foodways consist of many pieces coming together to form a complete picture. While it’d be impossible to capture every name, legacy, and visage and represent them here, the exhibit is meant to showcase just how many lives intertwine to tell the larger story of Black foodways in America.

“It’s really an extraordinary thing,” says Harris of the quilt. Some of the quilt’s featured faces, such as legendary chef Leah Chase, the matriarch of New Orleans’ Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and perhaps the most well-known Creole chef, will be recognizable to visitors; other figures, no less important, may be less familiar. Emmanuel ‘Manna’ Bernoon, a freed Black man who opened Providence, Rhode Island’s first oyster and ale house, is represented alongside a panel featuring an oyster adorned with a single pearl. Some blocks represent whole, unnamed groups of people, like women harvesting rice and men tending to chicken coops. An outline of a jug symbolizes distilling, a practice that enslaved Africans turned into an art on plantations but were rarely given credit for, the most famous example being Nathan ‘Nearest’ Green who taught a young Jack Daniel how to distill whiskey. Everything comes together to create a story. 

“We’re hoping that visitors understand the foundational African American contributions that have created our shared culinary identity in this country,” says Catherine Piccoli, curatorial director for MoFaD. According to the museum, “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” is the nation’s first major exhibition celebrating the contributions of Black culinarians who laid the foundation for American food culture. From enslaved cooks to free men and women, from entrepreneurs and chefs to brewers, distillers, and more, African Americans have baked, brewed, cut, tilled, harvested, planted, and nurtured American food over centuries. The exhibition preserves these stories and artifacts related to Black food culture and the many ways African Americans have shaped the nation’s food landscape. 

The exhibit explores how traditional tribal brewing practices in Africa led to distilling in the American South through archival photos and artifacts, and also spotlights cookbooks from African American chefs like vegan chef Bryant Terry and writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor that document regionality in Black foodways. 

Further along in the exhibition, visitors will encounter Ebony magazine’s sunburst-colored test kitchen, the setting where writer Frieda DeKnight tested recipes which would appear in her “Date with a Dish” column and The Ebony Cookbook, which was published in 1978. The kitchen, which showcased and cataloged recipes that spoke to America’s burgeoning Black middle class from the 1970’s to 2000’s, looks just as it originally did when it lived at Johnson Publishing Company’s headquarters in Chicago and features a soundtrack curated by musician, farmer, and chef Kelis, as well as video interviews with former Ebony food editors.

Visitors can end the exhibit by sitting down to a shoebox-lunch tasting, inspired by boxed lunches Black travelers packed to avoid having to stop for food during the Jim Crow-era, when simply stopping at a restaurant could be dangerous. The menu, created by chefs Carla Hall, Adrienne Cheatham, Chris Scott, and Kwame Onwuachi, rotates monthly.

Chef Scott’s menu includes a boiled peanut hummus and buckwheat crackers to show visitors the versatility of peanuts, also known as groundnuts, a direct link to West African cuisine. “I want to speak to the importance of agriculture and take that staple to make something interesting,” he says of his dish. Scott hopes people who visit the exhibit and eat lunch here will realize that it’s about more than what’s on their plate. “Come for the food and stay for the story, the hard work, and the emotion,” he says. “We were able to make something out of nothing. There’s beauty in that.” 

The story, Harris points out, will only continue. “Hopefully this exhibit is the first of many, and it grows and grows.”

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You can learn a lot about a culture by looking at its food: How a dish is cooked and served is often rooted in years of tradition, passed down from one generation to the next. The food of Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration of the end of slavery in America, is no exception. On June 19, 1865, more than two months after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to the Union and more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s official Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved African-Americans living in Galveston, Texas were informed that slavery had finally been abolished. Today, this belated liberation is commemorated with Juneteenth, a holiday that’s widely observed not only in Texas, but all over the South and in cities across the United States.

Food has always played an important part in Juneteenth gatherings, from soulful dishes like collard greens, fried chicken, and cornbread to red foods that have come to symbolize perseverance and resilience, such as watermelon and strawberry sodas.

When it comes to the culinary landscape today, black chefs are still fighting to get African-American cuisine the recognition it deserves. Black and brown cooks have always been the backbone of the restaurant industry, but it remains a struggle for many to rise to the level of prestige enjoyed by their white peers. For Juneteenth this year, I spoke to four prominent black chefs about their unique approaches to cooking African-American food and how they each celebrate the holiday of liberation.

Perhaps best known for her stint as a co-host of the talk show “The Chew” and her numerous appearances on the “Top Chef” series, chef Carla Hall has always used her love of food and her infectious smile to connect with people. But it wasn’t necessarily easy: “The biggest challenge was not seeing myself, or my food, anywhere in the industry,” she says. “You don’t even see it as a possibility. The pride of understanding my culture gave me more confidence in being a chef.”

For the Nashville native, food has always been tied to family and tradition. But it wasn’t until Hall started to dig deeper into her roots that she developed a true understanding of the foods she grew up eating and of where they fit into African-American culture, a journey she explores in her cookbook, Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration. The book includes one of her go-to recipes for Juneteenth gatherings, a vibrant, tangy watermelon salad with red radishes, habanero-pickled red onions, and lime salt. “Juneteenth is a time to celebrate and reflect on our community and our collective history of fighting for liberation and equality,” she says.

Marcus Samuelsson

For Marcus Samuelsson of New York City’s Red Rooster, food is about all about community. The Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef may not have roots in Harlem, but he has found a home in its thriving restaurant scene. “Cooking doesn’t live outside society,” he says. “Cooking lives within society. Racism is within cooking just as anywhere else, and I think that you overcome it by working really hard and having mentors that guide you through. I look at the blessings of being black. I look at what it’s given me and the opportunities it’s given me.”

Since opening Red Rooster, Samuelsson has played an integral part in showcasing the neighborhood’s diverse restaurants and giving a platform to local black chefs by participating in events like the Harlem Dine-In Series. When it comes to celebrating Juneteenth, he says, “So much about blackness and our history—oral or written down—has either been taken away or there has always been a false narrative. So when you have dates [like Juneteenth] that mark our history in terms of liberation, I think of the strength of that.”

JJ Johnson

JJ Johnson has risen fast within the ranks of New York City chefs, culminating in his leading the kitchen at Henry at the Life Hotel. His cookbook Between Harlem & Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Nights, Weeknights, and Every Day, co-written with Alexander Smalls and Veronica Chambers, also recently took home the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.

Inspired by his upbringing, Johnson’s culinary style makes inspired use of Caribbean flavors and African spices. “I’m offering my lens on the pan-African experience,” he says. “I cook pan-African food because I’m made up of the diaspora. I’m West Indian, Afro-Puerto Rican, and African-American. I’m not blending cultures; I’m expressing how they’ve lived together over hundreds of years.” Celebrating Juneteenth, Johnson continues, is “an opportunity to fill in the missing pages of history by honoring the price our ancestors paid for faces they’d never see.”

Jerome Grant

Jerome Grant’s approach to cooking has very much been informed by his own history: he learned the basics of Filipino cuisine from his mom, explored Caribbean food while spending time with his paternal grandparents in Jamaica, and grew up all over the United States. “I take a lot of pride in my culture and family traditions,” he says, “and it is important to me that I incorporate various pieces of African-American culture into my food. I want to tell the stories of the African diaspora and how we shaped American cuisine as we know it today.”

In 2016, Grant was named the executive chef of Sweet Home Café, the restaurant inside the Smithsonian’s historic Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Two years later, he released a cookbook with historians Lonnie Bunch and Jessica B. Harris called Sweet Home Café Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking, which was nominated for a James Beard Award. In addition to offering recipes from the café itself, the book delves into iconic African-American dishes and shines a light on the oft-overlooked contributions of black cooks to American foodways.

For Grant, Juneteenth “is a day of gratitude for those who have fought and paved the way for our generation today, a day of celebration for the successes of our people, but also one of reflection. It’s a reminder of all the work that is still needed to be done for our future.”

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