Family Of The Spirit Cookbook: Recipes And Rememberances From African-American Kitchens

Family Of The Spirit Cookbook: Recipes And Rememberances From African-American Kitchens

Captures the mulitple culinary styles of the African Atlantic world, featuring simple Southern dishes as well as exotic foods of the Caribbean islandsFrom Publishers WeeklyWhat might have been an engaging blend of Studs Terkel-like oral history and Jeff Smith-like frugal cookery is instead a pastiche of familiar folk wisdom and uneven recipes that is closer kin to community church cooking than to full-blown culinary exploration. Many of the recipes collected here do convey a sense of the breadth of influences on African-American fare, especially evident in such dishes as curried goat, okra gumbo and stewed turkey necks. These also suggest a driving force behind the heritage--"to cook things that were sustenance and economical" and "to use everything." But many of the 11 cooks who reminisce and provide edibles are oddly unrevealing in their talk--"Life was hard, but I would say I had a really nice childhood"--and give us relatively little insight into their food traditions. Recipes of "authentic" dishes are undermined by such requirements as packaged cornbread mix. An introduction might have given the book a clearer focus; we leave it wanting more. Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalPinderhughes, a New York photographer, has collected recipes and memories from a dozen of his relatives and friends, who include Leah Chase, chef and author of The Dooky Chase Cookbook ( LJ 8/90) and Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor, author of Vibration Cooking (Ballantine, 1986). But the contributions from these two women are among the more interesting in this undertaking; many of the dishes are standard Southern home cooking, and the recollections of most of the other contributors are just too personal to be of wide interest.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.