Harlem makes you hungry. For food. For art. For music. For street style. For history. For old people. For young people. For kids playing basketball that’s so good that pro players hit the courts during their off hours. For girls who jump rope with so many flips and so much gymnastic flair that every other sidewalk feels like an olympic arena.
Directions on how to get to Harlem inspired one of the most famous jazz standards of our time. In 1939, Duke Ellington offered a young musician named Billy Strayhorn a place in his orchestra. He sent him money to travel, by train, from Pittsburgh to New York City. Once Strayhorn arrived in New York City, Ellington instructed him how to get to his home in Harlem: Take the A train. Strayhorn turned the directions into a song and it became a beloved tune that was the signature of Duke Ellington’s orchestra.
Ella Fitzgerald recorded the song more than a dozen times, and you can her live version, complete with her signature scatting, on Ella in Hollywood. The song has been recorded and performed by artists as diverse as Charles Mingus, Chaka Khan, Phish, and the Rolling Stones.
It’s as true now as it was back in 1939: To get to Duke Ellington’s Harlem, you take the A train. (You can also take the B or the C.) When you get there, you’ll want to head directly to Minton’s, but don’t rush and don’t, if you can help it, Uber there. You don’t want door-to-door service when you’re coming to Harlem to eat. You want to take it all in. Let Harlem make you hungry first.
Harlem is where we met and began to create the culinary journey that is this book. You have to understand that Alexander‘s home is one of Harlem‘s most revered salons. Drop by any given Sunday and you will find movie stars and musicians, architects and athletes. Alexander spent decades traveling the globe as a Tony Award–winning opera singer, and offstage, he began to mix the low-country cooking of his South Carolina roots with dishes and flavors from all across the African diaspora. JJ was an up-and-coming chef who had been trained in classic European techniques but longed to bring to the table the influences of his Caribbean childhood and all the ways that brought Asia and Africa together on the plate. Using Alexander’s kitchen as a laboratory, the two men began to create the Afro-Asian-American flavor profile that comprises this book. Instead of the traditional mother sauces of France, they whipped up a peanut sauce they called the Mother Africa sauce. They served citrus jerk bass with a West African grain called fonio. They served spiced goat onigiri style, enshrined in a square of sticky rice. Oxtail dumplings in a green apple curry was something they’d never seen on any other menu, but it was beautiful to the eye and even more delicious to taste
Together, Alexander and JJ opened two restaurants, The Cecil and Minton’s, both occupying classic Harlem spaces rich with history. And just as people flocked to Alexander’s living room where the food was plentiful, the cocktails were sweet, and the company was sweeter, the Afro-Asian-American flavor profile brought diners to a part of Harlem that many had never visited before. Esquire named The Cecil the best new restaurant in America and reservations became hard to come by. There were nights when ambassadors dined with world leaders and nights when there were so many Grammy Award winners at a table that no one was surpised when they burst into song. You can get roast chicken and grilled salmon anywhere, but you had to come uptown for plaintain kelewele and tofu gnocchi with black garlic crema and scallions.
As you’ll see when you begin to cook from this collection, Alexander and JJ are artists first and cooks second. As they begin new creative journeys professionally, this cookbook commemorates a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration. Nobody saved the menu, or the recipes, for many Harlem’s most iconic suppers during its first Renaisssance when writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jessie Fauset began to find their voices. But what Paul Kellogg wrote about the magic and power of Harlem to inspire new and diverse voices with the power to change the world is as true now as it ever was: “We are interpreting a racial and cultural revival in the new environment of the nothern city; interpreting the affirmative genius of writers, thinkers, poets, artists, singers, and musicians, which make for a new rapprochement between races at the same time that they contribute to the common pot of civilization.”
These recipes were developed by Alexander Smalls and JJ Johnson. While chef at The Cecil, JJ brought these recipes to life in the kitchen and with the cooking team. The“I” in the recipe headnotes refers to JJ, unless otherwise noted.
We hope this book will allow you to visit Harlem every time you make one of these recipes, and that you’ll find, as we have, that the dishes gathered here both fill your plate and feed your imagination. To paraphrase that great Harlem Renaissance poet Jean Toomer:
Harlem is the kind
of place that calls
you from your home
and teaches you
how to dream.
AFRO-ASIAN-AMERICAN COOKING FOR
BIG NIGHTS, WEEKNIGHTS, & EVERY DAY
