Someone's in the kitchen with Arturo

Like a lot of folks in these locked down times, I think about food. A lot--what I can find, what I can persuade people to deliver, and what I can cook. There is a school of culinary thought that says all US cuisine derives from African-American cuisine, and African-American cuisine is the United States' only original, homegrown cuisine. Sure, we eat food and dishes from all over, but our national bedrock, our unique contribution to the culinary world is the product of centuries of black cooks and black celebrity chefs. (Yes, our first homegrown celebrity chefs, dating to the early 19th century, were all African-American. Look it up.

Arturo Schomburg--writer, thinker and historian of the Harlem Renaissance--wanted to celebrate that legacy in a mammoth collection of 400 recipes. It was never published, but still became a seminal work of modern culinary history. What strikes me, however, is what a totally American tale the story of his never-finished cookbook is, from his book proposal's stated pan-American goals to its much more limited, US-centric focus to the one recipe it contained: a recipe for gumbo from a cookbook by Lafcadio Hearn.

Hearn, for those of you who aren't obsessed with Japanese movies (Greg Uchrin, I'm looking at you), was an Irish-Greek American newspaper man, who after years of covering stories around the US and the Caribbean, moved to Japan, took a Japanese name (Koizumi Yakumo), and wrote a number of seminal collections of Japanese ghost stories and legends, including KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS. The United States is and always has been a melting pot, a great big glorious stew of people and ideas. Celebrate it!

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/arturo-schomburg-cookbook


#ArturoSchomburg #LafcadioHearn #AmericanCooking #recipes