Jessica B. Harris Is Telling Her Own Story Now

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I had a whole plan for my meeting with Jessica Harris. I’d take lunch from one of the West Indian joints in my neighborhood, the ones I fear are an endangered species, given the pace of change in New York (you can still find jerk chicken, grilled on the street, in my part of Brooklyn, but you can also buy a four-dollar Americano). I walked to the Trinidadian place for doubles, those hard to classify/impossible to resist chickpea sandwiches. I imagined Harris would tell me what spices it contained and how those came to flourish in the West Indies.

It was not to be. It was a Monday, and the place was closed.

But it was no matter; Harris and I had no shortage of things to discuss. I sat in the crowded living room of her home in Brooklyn and was assaulted by her incredibly friendly and grandly-named cats, Hatshepsut and Hannibal. Surrounded by the accrued props of three decades—paintings, family photographs, numerous awards, assorted bric-a-brac, and more books than I’ve ever seen in a single residence—Doctor Harris perched in an armchair and entertained my questions, her answers ranging from a half-remembered poem by Ntozake Shange to the popularity of the television show Chopped, from old French sumptuary laws to her go-to order at a favorite restaurant (anchovy frites, in case you’re wondering).

Dr. Jessica B. Harris

Kristy May

To many, Harris is a living legend; the others, perhaps, have not been paying close attention. You most often hear her referred to as a culinary historian, which is certainly true, though it falls short of covering the actual breadth of her work. Harris has published widely as a journalist, with stints on the restaurant and travel beats; has written 12 cookbooks; and frequently lectures on the subject of food. The territory she has made her own is (and here I’m oversimplifying) the foods of Africa and the African diaspora, encompassing Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, including the cuisine we know as American. When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture was developing a menu, they called in Jessica Harris.

Impressive as that CV is, it’s all the more so when you learn that food isn’t Jessica Harris’s only job. She gained prominence as a unique hybrid of scholar and home cook while serving as a professor at Queens College—not, as one might assume, in anthropology, but first in the French and later in the English department. She’s on the faculty there to this day. Still, despite her incredible erudition and her long tenure in the academy, Harris corrects me when I refer to her as an academic.

“I would say I’m a teacher," she said. "I think there are teachers who teach by telling stories.”

You can’t talk about African cuisines in the Americas, period, without factoring in the stigma of enslavement

Storytelling is certainly one of her strengths. Some of the world’s cookbooks feel like algebra problems, laden with stern warnings; Harris’s are more for the cook who wants to chop vegetables while knocking back a few rum cocktails and gossiping with a friend. That confident and comfortable voice serves her well in her new book, My Soul Looks Back, a departure from her oeuvre in that it’s purely memoir. Though there are a couple of recipes mixed in—“Proust and the madeline,” Harris says—it’s not about food at all, but instead about a magical moment, now passed, when a wise-beyond-her-years kid could move to the West Village, rub elbows with James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, and make the life she wanted. As the best memoirs do, it made me nostalgic for a place and life that were never my own. It will perhaps surprise no one that it also made me quite hungry.

On the jackets of her books, Harris is billed as One of the handful of African Americans who’ve achieved prominence in the culinary world, a statement that’s as extraordinary in its candor as it is maddening in its accuracy. “I think that was written by Simon and Schuster at some point,” Harris says, then pauses. “And I don't disagree with it. I don't know what it means vis a vis the contemporary culinary world—I ain’t Carla Hall, who’s certainly prominent. She is a star. That is not me.”

Who made the first omelet? Who the hell knows? Noodles, pasta—is it China, is it Italy?

Now near seventy, Harris has silvered hair, a stentorian voice, an understated laugh. She has presence. And she is most certainly a star in certain circles, having long enjoyed that prominence, having long been that one of a handful. But prominence can be a particular trap: Do you wear being exceptional as point of pride or bear it as a kind of punishment?

While working as a teacher, Harris moonlighted as a journalist—she wrote about books, reviewed the theater, and maintained a travel column at Essence, which gave rise to her first work about food, Hot Stuff: A Cookbook in Praise of the Piquant. Four years later, Harris published the seminal Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking. Her cookbooks are marked by a global perspective, a chatty tone, and a rigorous methodology. (“Rather than go immediately to recipe, I went to research," she says. "I read Marco Polo's diaries.”) They’re for cooking, for scholarship, and for entertainment all at once.

Harris allows that her work—or Iron Pots specifically—is in some ways a product of its era. “It was a time of coming out of black power movements, black cultural identity movements. There were people who called themselves cultural nationalists—and they were about African culture, and wearing African garments, and speaking Swahili,” she says. Harris contributed to this effort by laying out how the black Americans who survived the Middle Passage indelibly, if largely invisibly, affected the way we eat to this very day.

“You can’t talk about African cuisines in the Americas, period, without factoring in the whole stigma, not self-created but imposed, of enslavement,” Harris says. She handily connects the class connotations of food today to those of generations ago.

“If you are enslaved peoples and you’re given foods that are not the best ingredients, and then you transform them into something tasty, savory, nourishing that keeps your family and your people going, despite horrific conditions—that never gets lauded.” If you take enslavement out of the equation, this particular attitude prevails even now; all too often, we sanctify certain modes of eating and disdain, say, the semi-homemade.

Harris argues persuasively that black cooks in this country deserve credit for their impact on American food, both its haute cuisine and its homespun cooking. Iron Pots celebrates black cooks for reimagining the gruel they were fed on slave ships as Hoppin’ John. High On The Hog gives the black chefs who worked in service to America’s most prominent households (the White House included) their due for creating this country’s fine dining traditions.

Of course, the way food changes and evolves is complex. “Who made the first omelet?” Harris asks. “Who the hell knows? Noodles, pasta—is it China, is it Italy? Is it somewhere between the two? Or is it somewhere we haven't even figured out yet?” If we can’t conclusively answer the how, we can at least know the who: Harris’s work teaches us that we should respect previous generations of anonymous cooks. When you consider how deeply this society has debased the black experience, simply telling the truth begins to seem like an exercise in black pride.

I'd like to think I could write a book about the food of France. I don't know that the world is ready for that.

We understand better, now, how appetite and anthropology intersect; this is in part due to Jessica Harris. Nowadays, the chef-as-adventurer is a familiar figure. He goes off the beaten path in search of something authentic; he explains how x from some far-off land is similar to y from here at home; he celebrates his derring-do for sampling something so different. He delights in the humble ingredient, technique, dish; he takes them back to his kitchen and adapts them. Cultural evolution looks quite different when sped up for the benefit of the television camera, and it’s hard not to notice that the chef-as-adventurer doesn’t look much like Harris.

She’s not unaware of this. “I think we tend to get balkanized, people of color, specifically,” she says. “Yet a chef who is not of color can write about any cuisine they want to.” Harris pauses for a moment. “I'd like to think I could write a book about the food of France. I don't know that the world is ready for that. I don't know that the publishers are ready for that.”

Jessica Harris declares that her primary interest is not food but culture. “I have said for years that if I ever did a culinary autobiography, it would probably be called The Reluctant Foodie.” That is not the tale told in My Soul Looks Back.

Soul is akin to the critic Margo Jefferson’s recent Negroland in its focus on America’s black intellectual class. But where Jefferson’s book was also a ruthless excavation of her self, in this memoir, Harris is an elusive character. “I am not central to the story, although I have lived it,” she writes. The primary narrative here is how Harris’s romance with Sam Floyd—a colleague at Queens College who was fifteen years her elder—brought her into a social circle, concentrated in New York’s Greenwich Village, that included some of America’s most prominent black citizens, at least a couple of whom went on to become legends.

James Baldwin and Maya Angelou tower over the story—how could they not? But Harris may be circumspect because it’s her natural tendency. “I'm not given to bragging,” she says. “One of the things I learned from the book is that I’m certainly the child of Edwardian parents. You don't do that.”

It may also have something to do with the fact that Baldwin and Angelou were already prominent when Harris first met them, and two decades older than her to boot. You get the sense that even all these years later, she’s still awed to have been welcomed at their tables.

“There is an almost Hippocratic oath, if you will, for memoir writing,” Harris says. “First, do no harm. This is not a scandal book. It’s not a tell-all book. It's a book about good times that were had.”

Okay, sure. But though Harris may not spill tea, there’s delight in the details nevertheless. Here she is describing dinner at Angelou’s home in Sonoma.

The preparation was an exercise in hospitality. Maya’s cooking was a virtuoso performance that was part monologue and part dance routine, totally engaging and absolutely fascinating…. All was underscored by a running patter of anecdotes from her travels studded with information on the ingredients, commentary on the preparation, and descriptions of each dish. It was a whole new form of dinner theater: an entertainment calculated to astonish, amaze, and delight.

And here she is recounting a visit to Baldwin's home in St. Paul-de-Vence as he’s finishing his novel If Beale Street Could Talk: "We took up our positions in chairs, on the bed, and on the floor, and popcorn was distributed. I noticed that I was seated near Jimmy, so that he seemed to be reading directly to me.” Baldwin reads the entire manuscript to his guests; a few nights later, they’re joined by Toni Morrison, and he reads the book to them again.

Harris knew legends (I won’t spoil for you the story she tells about running into Nina Simone at a hotel in Abidjan) but she also knew luminaries; if she drops names, it doesn’t feel exhausting but like a generous act of witnessing. I came away curious to know more about Rosa Guy, Louise Meriwether, Paule Marshall, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and the other writers and intellectuals in her orbit. But I also wanted to know more about Harris herself. With any luck, her editors will persuade her to tackle The Reluctant Foodie next.

Many writers have covered New York’s constant evolution. For Harris, naturally, food and drink are the reference point, and she conjures a pre-Whole Foods Manhattan:

At home, fondue sets graced tables, and crudités with a savory dip from Lipton Onion Soup were the ne plus ultra in entertaining styles. I cracked open my Mastering the Art of French Cooking and learned how to make coq au vin, although I couldn’t find the required pearl onions at Balducci’s and substituted a can of black-eyed peas that I had on hand.

Harris writes evocatively of El Faro, a Spanish restaurant “at the nether end of the ‘respectable’ Village,” where now, of course, you’ll find some of this city’s most luxurious apartments.

It bustled nightly with the activity of neighborhood folks for whom it represented one of the few dining options…. Those in the know or with little to spend who wanted something comforting and warming would order the Galician specialty: caldo gallego, a hearty kale and sausage soup rich with shredded collard greens and chunks of potato.

There’s something alluring about the comparatively simple modes of eating, drinking, and entertaining that Harris documents (“Usually the wine came in half-gallon jugs,” she writes.) She tells of hosting Mary Painter, an intimate of Baldwin’s (to whom he dedicated Another Country) and her husband Georges Garin for dinner, improvising a choucroute garnie. Years later, as the couple’s guest at their restaurant in Paris, Harris is mortified to discover that Garin is a world-class chef to whom she offered “unwashed sauerkraut, hot dogs, beer, and gin.”

I'm not one for bragging. You don't do that.

Still, she tells us:

Georges, it seemed, could have cared less. He’d accepted my gift as it was offered, mirroring an adage that I’d learned from my parents but that had been confirmed by Sam: when entertaining, always offer the best that you can afford to and do not skimp.

My Soul Looks Back is a great New York City memoir; I thought of James Wolcott’s Lucking Out and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, both documents of the city in the seventies, as well as books from an earlier New York, like Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage and Mary Cantwell’s Manhattan, When I Was Young. Nostalgia is powerful if ultimately useless. Sure, the West Village now belongs to Christian Louboutin and Apple, but passionate conversation, good friends, and simple but good food still exist, right?

I finished the book eager to find a noisy neighborhood restaurant where the wine is served in mismatched glasses and the specials are under twenty dollars. Maybe no one I know will grow up to be James Baldwin, but there’s still stimulating conversation to be had. Harris, ever the teacher, explained it to me. “The point is when you get to be my age, the Brooklyn that you knew when you first came here will be long gone in the same kind of way,” she says. “None of it’s static. It’s always in movement.”

Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty.