Foreword

I first met Zaki, as I shall call her from now on, in 1977 in Manhattan. It was a loft party and she was new in town. The room was filled with divas and “devos.” And she still stood out with an energy that charged the room. Folks were asking, “Who is that?” Someone said, “She’s that rainbow girl.” Someone else said, “She’s a gypsy.” Others said, “She’s a dancer, a poet.” Uh uhhh, she is all that.

Many people were surprised that the “colored girl who was all that” was writing a cookbook. I wasn’t. It was obvious from her earlier works, especially Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo, that a cookbook was simmering.

Zaki, in the tradition of Dumas, Colette, Amado, and other writers, understands the importance and connections of food and culture and how they are entwined in our everyday lives and manifest on our tables.

When I was growing up in Carolina low country, I didn’t know the word culture. We just did the things we did the way we did them because that’s the way they were done. We said what we said because we said it. I had no idea that many things we did in our everyday life reflected an African connection. When Gramama Sula said, “Yenna come nyam,” we came to the table. I had no idea nyam was an African root word for “to eat” that can still be heard throughout the Americas. Besides, anything African was to be jettisoned into the Atlantic. Lots of people came to study the ways and customs of us low-country Geechee/Gullah folks, but no persons or books said, “It’s a good thing. Honor the culture.”

For my generation, it was a mark of shame to be like an African. But all praises to the food goddess. Now we have If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, a creative culinary celebration that compels us to hear the words, taste the spices, and feel the rhythms of Africa in the new world.

I don’t know if she was born with it or if she developed it from a mighty culinary curiosity and/or life experiences, but for sure Zaki has a cosmopolitan palate. In this book she feasts on poetry and turtle eggs and spices in Nicaragua, and is apt at shopping the markets of Brixton in England or of Brooklyn, New York.

If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is testimony to the fact that although we may leave home, get rid of our accents, and change our names and diets, the aroma of certain foods will trigger warm memories and fill us with a longing and taste to return home. Once in Rome I passed someone’s apartment and the smell of collard greens “gently stewing in the pot,” as Langston Hughes wrote, made my eyes tear and knees buckle. I wanted to go home.

Zaki is a culinary traveler who knows when it’s time to return to her roots. She can cook Brazilian rice and rice à la Carolina low country like her grandma Viola. This homegirl riffs on Barbadian flying fish, shark, and breadfruit and takes us back to the States to talk about harvesting sweet potatoes, fixing mustard greens, making chicken-fried steak, and growing watermelons. However, take note that she only be talking red watermelon, as in Oscar Brown Jr.’s vendor’s cry, “Watermelon red to the rind!” Zaki makes it clear that she has no primal response to a “golden or blanched fleshed melon.”

A personal culinary memoir, a travelogue with dashes of literature and pinches of music, this book is also a culinary history lesson, a history of what I call the Afro-Atlantic foodways. This heritage has been a confounding, embarrassing, and frightening inheritance for many. Zaki travels through it courageously.

She writes, “I remind myself that history, our history, mustn’t scare me. Our history is the stuff rhumbas are made of, mambos, the jitterbug.” And the mashed potato.

It’s the history that until recently has been underappreciated and greatly distorted. Like urban legends the myths become ludicrous narratives. There are two myths that make me madder than a wet hen, and I want to beat them with a mallet:

1. “Slaves brought foods with them during the Middle Passage.”

This culinary falsehood is so widely believed that some food historians have written that the Africans carried luck, bringing sesame seeds in their ears to the new world. Yes, certain foods did travel the Middle Passage to the Americas but they were not carried in the ears or baggage of kidnapped Africans.

2. “‘Soul food’—collard greens, okra, cornbread, pig’s feet, etc.—grew out of ‘massa’s’ leftovers and is a unique non-cuisine, eaten only by blacks in the southern United States.”

So what are those delicately flavored, thin shiny green ribbons served in Rio every Saturday along with the feijoada?

Oh, you say couve, we say kale, or collards . . . and in Bahian is that okra I spy in your shrimp carúrú?

You say those fritters frying are made out of black-eyed peas and you call them acaraje?

Uhmm Ola told me they call them akara in Lagos.

And we make something like that out of cornmeal and call them hush puppies.

You say you been making bread out of corn for centuries in Vera Cruz?

And those fried, stuffed pig’s feet I had at that little Left-Bank bistro were from what region of France?

In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can Zaki reminds us of those culinary connections and expands our culinary horizons. She will tempt you to eat a big slice of avocado and down it with beer. And then she’ll suggest you serve wheatmeat with organic brown rice when company is coming. And she is bold! In the nineties, the decade of lattes and rice cakes, where the f-word (fried) is unspeakable, she gives a recipe for french-fried chitlins. She doesn’t insist that you eat what she eats or fix it her way, though. She understands it’s your kitchen. But no matter, she’s so engaging, she’ll make you pause and consider what you put in your mouth.

Zaki has taken the lid off the cultural melting pot—and what a splendid aroma! If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a mouthwatering, smoking-hot, nourishing stew. It’s being served on a table handcrafted and carved in Haiti. There are daylilies from Savannah, coxcombs and marigolds from Oaxaca, and wild-flowers from across the Americas. The centerpiece is a cornucopia of coconuts, cassava, plantain, mangoes, papaya, bananas, eggplants, breadfruit, true yam, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, star-fruit, persimmons, and other delectables. It’s dished up in earthenware bowls and eaten with silver-handled wooden spoons. There’s crusty golden pain de la maïs in Gullah sweetgrass baskets kept warm with heavy linens trimmed with delicate lace from Guadeloupe, and crystal glasses of sweetened iced tea.

So yenna come nyam! Enjoy! I did and you know God can!

—VERTAMAE GROSVENOR