Rice stories fascinate us as much as the dishes themselves. Wherever we go in the world, we love to hear how a particular rice dish became a part of the home we’re visiting. An example: in Senegal, a woman is making dinner. She is telling a story about the first Indochina Wars. Her grandfather was one of the more than half a million Senegalese soldiers sent to fight, on behalf of France, in 1946. Vietnam was called French Indochina then, and that country, like Senegal, was a colony of France. The woman’s grandfather returned home from the war, like many of his contemporaries, with a Vietnamese bride. The woman takes out a picture to show her grandmother: her long and silky jet-black hair, the silk dresses she made at home. The dish she is making is thiéboudiènne in French, ceebu jen in Wolof, and it means “fish and rice.” But it is not just any fish and rice: It is broken rice, fresh fish and dried fish, a fermented spice called nététou. You can taste Vietnam in this dish, in the fish and the fermentation, in the broken rice, which is called com tam in Vietnam.
If we traveled the world from Africa to Asia and all the points of the diaspora, we could eat only rice and we would not starve. On the contrary, we would feast. We could start on New Year’s Day in Charleston, South Carolina, where certainly we would eat hoppin’ John, the traditional holiday meal of black-eyed peas and rice, seasoned with a bit of smoked pork. The dish is considered a symbol of good fortune for the year ahead. As culinary historian Jessica B. Harris explains in her wonderful essay “Prosperity Begins with a Pea,” although some historians connect hoppin’ John to the way it sustained the hungry during the Civil War, “For African Americans, the connection between beans and fortune is surely complex. Perhaps, because dried black-eyed peas can be germinated, having some extra on hand at the New Year guaranteed sustenance provided by a new crop of the fast-growing vines. The black-eyed pea and rice combination also forms a complete protein, offering all of the essential amino acids. During slavery, one ensured of such nourishment was lucky indeed.”
South Carolina was called the Rice Kingdom because of the way the colony turned rice into a cash crop in the eighteenth century. Slavery was essential to the production of rice: The work was backbreaking, but even more the slaves were skilled rice farmers who taught the planters how to “properly dyke the marshes, periodically flood the rice fields and use sweetgrass baskets for milling the rice quicker than wooden paddles.” But we’d like to reclaim that term, the Rice Kingdom, because rice is so much bigger than its exploitative colonial past.
All around the world, more than 3.5 billion people depend on rice for more than 20 percent of their daily food consumption. Everywhere rice is served, it shows off its diasporic heritage. Sushi in Japan bridges with sushi in Brazil, where Japanese and African immigrants add their flavors to the mix. Paella in Spain shares the same pan-crusty deliciousness as bimbimbap in Korea. Season it with saffron and top the rice with hard-boiled eggs and you’ve got an Anglo-Indian kedgeree; fry the egg and put it on top of the rice and you’ve got a Hawaiian loco moco. Cooking the rice in coconut milk is a common thread, from the arroz con gandules of Latin America to the nasi kuning of Indonesia. Lemon rice in southern India bridges with a lemony risotto in northern Italy. Pilau rice, a play on pilaf, leapfrogs from India to Kenya, where they claim pilau as their own. As we’ve noted, West Africans are the second largest consumers of rice in the world after Asia: That’s one region eating nearly as much rice as a continent that includes China.
What makes rice extraordinary is that we are never simply eating the dish in front of us. Each bowl of rice connects us, grain by grain, to the roads we’ve traveled and the places we’ve dined. In Harlem, we are always talking about rice: the best rice we’ve had recently, new varieties of rice, how to cook all of the many varieties of rice, and what to pair them with. Our Pineapple Black Fried Rice is a house favorite that we think you’ll soon claim as your own. Our Brown Rice Grits is one of those dishes that you can serve for supper, then eat for leftovers at breakfast, and then nibble on the following day as a late-afternoon snack. Our Spiced Goat with Sticky Rice is an easy-to-make but impressive dish that works as well with any kind of roasted meat. Our Jollof Rice and Beans is a steaming plate of tomatoey goodness that will act as a base for any kind of comfort meal you plan on making.
The poet Nayyirah Waheed wrote, “Can we speak in flowers? It will be easier for me to understand.” Rest assured, rice is a universal language. Wherever and however you serve these recipes, you are offering a gift and an invitation: for your guests to share in your rice story and for them to offer up their own.