#black american cookbook

[what-marsha-eats]

Chef Kia Damon has teamed up with @bembrooklyn to curate a list of some of her favorite cookbooks highlighting Black chefs and food histories. Check out the full list below:

📚The Jemima Code by Toni Tipton-Martin

📚Mama Dip's Kitchen by Mildred Council

📚A Date with A Dish by Freda DeKnight

📚Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook by Pamela Strobel

📚The Black Family Reunion Cookbook by the National Council of Negro Women

[tabney2023]

Patti LaBelle

LaBelle Cuisine: Recipes to Sing About Available on Amazon USA

Patti LaBelle, living legend, beloved musical icon, “Godmother of Soul” (The New York Times), and New York Times bestselling cookbook author, crafts a new collection of her favorite comfort food recipes to help you bring joy and flavor to your family’s table.

[poeticmc-blog]

AFRICAN AMERICAN BOOKS AD

[rotzaprachim]

some smaller bookstores, presses, and museum shops to browse and know about! Most support smaller presses, diverse authors and authors in translation, or fund museums and arts research)

(disclaimer: the only three I’ve personally used are the Yiddish book center, native books, and izzun books! Reccomend all three. Also roughly *U.S. centric & anglophone if people have others from around the world please feel free to add on

birchbark books - Louise Erdrich’s book shop, many indigenous and First Nations books of a wide variety of genres including children’s books, literature, nonfiction, sustainability and foodways, language revitalization, Great Lakes area focus (https://birchbarkbooks.com/)

American Swedish institute museum store - range of Scandinavian and Scandinavian-American/midwestern literature, including modern literature in translation, historical documents, knitters guides, cookbooks, children’s books https://shop.asimn.org/collections/books-1

Native books - Hawai’i based bookstore with a focus on native Hawaiian literature, scholarly works about Hawai’i, the pacific, and decolonial theory, ‘ōlelo Hawai’i, and children’s books Collections | Native Books (nativebookshawaii.org)

the Yiddish book center - sales arm of the national Yiddish book center, books on Yiddish learning, books translated from Yiddish, as well as broader selection of books on Jewish history, literature, culture, and coooking https://shop.yiddishbookcenter.org/

ayin press - independent press with a small but growing selection of modern judaica https://shop.ayinpress.org/collections/all?_gl=1kkj2oo_gaMTk4NDI3Mzc1Mi4xNzE1Mzk5ODk3_ga_VSERRBBT6X*MTcxNTM5OTg5Ny4xLjEuMTcxNTM5OTk0NC4wLjAuMA..

Izzun books - printers of modern progressive AND masorti/trad-egal leaning siddurim including a gorgeous egalitarian Sephardic siddur with full Hebrew, English translation, and transliteration

tenement center museum -https://shop.tenement.org/product-category/books/page/11/ range of books on a dizzying range of subjects mostly united by New York City, including the history literature cookbooks and cultures of Black, Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, First Nations, and Irish communities

restless books - nonprofit, independent small press focused on books on translation, inter and multicultural exchange, and books by immigrant writers from around the world. Particularly excellent range of translated Latin American literature https://restlessbooks.org/

olniansky press - modern Yiddish language press based in Sweden, translators and publishers esp of modern Yiddish children’s literature https://www.etsy.com/shop/OlnianskyBooks

https://yiddishchildrensbooks.com/ - kinder lokshen, Yiddish children’s books (not so many at the moment but a very cute one about a puffin from faroese!)

inhabit books - Inuit-owned publishing company in Nunavut with an “aim to preserve and promote the stories, knowledge, and talent of Inuit and Northern Canada.” Particularly gorgeous range of children’s books, many available in Inuktitut, English, French, or bilingual editions https://inhabitbooks.com/collections/inhabit-media-books-1

rust belt books - for your Midwest and rust belt bookish needs! Leaning towards academic and progressive political tomes but there are some cookbooks devoted to the art of the Midwest cookie table as well https://beltpublishing.com/

[marzipanandminutiae]

Do you know much about historical cuisine? Saw yet another anime with friends and they went the whole 'modern food always tastes better' bit. I feel tired of the trope and am wondering how different historical cuisine would taste compared to modern times. So anything you happen to know as a historian would be cool to know!

That varies MASSIVELY based on time and location. Like. Much more than fashion does, even, I'd imagine (in a given sub-region- I can talk about Mainstream European and Euro-American Fashion of the 19th CenturyTM but the food was so different in different countries that were dressing the same, if that makes sense? just as an example).

Food is often more globalized in a lot of places nowadays, so the characters might have more diversity of flavors from the regional norm than they're used to. But this could be a good or a bad thing- a woman from 17th-century Japan might love pizza and much sweeter Western pastries, or she might absolutely hate them. Which is not to say regional cuisines haven't evolved, too- a museum here in Boston used to have tastings of 18th-century-style hot chocolate, and it was very different from the modern sort. But that's the largest blanket difference across the globe that I can think of, food-wise.

Not sure what anime this was, so it could have been Japan-specific, but I feel like this gets applied the most to the 19th-mid 20th century UK and United States. The whole Captain America line about "food's better; we used to boil everything," for example, and the general belief that everything was bland mush in those areas until the 1950s and then it was incomprehensible Jell-O mold horrors until approximately the 1980s. And of course, none of that's true- there were plenty of dishes that used spices and different cooking methods, many of which are still popular today. See also: Jonathan Harker, a Normal 1890s Englishman, getting so rhapsodical about paprikahendl that he simply must have the recipe for his fiancee to make. There also WERE bland mushes and fluorescent nightmares, but there's less than ideal food today, as well.

(Note that I'm much less confident talking about the whole English StodgeTM thing as we get into the 20th century. That is outside my history wheelhouse and there's a lot of different stuff embroiled in it relating to class and such that I don't want to talk out my ass about. All I know is that I've seen plenty of recipes from as late as the end of the 19th century, from England and some from urban Scotland if I recall correctly, that made ample use of spices. Nutmeg, mustard, black pepper, rosemary, caraway, and cayenne pepper were especially popular (not all together obviously). There was a belief among the middle and upper classes that strong flavors of garlic and onion were distasteful to ladies, but the fact that cookbooks and such feel the need to mention it implies that those elements WERE being used in cooking generally, in the UK, at that time. So wherever the idea that All British Food Is Beige And Tasteless came from, it wasn't mainstream late Victorian cooking for adults as far as I can tell)

(They gave kids a fair amount of the beige and tasteless because they believed their digestive systems couldn't handle strongly-flavored- okay now I'm getting off topic. Read Ruth Goodman's "How To Be A Victorian." Anyway!)

tl;dr- The answer to "is modern food better?" is "that's literally impossible to answer as a blanket statement, since it's massively dependent on the character's original time, place, social status, and personal taste- and where they end up in the present, of course."

Now, I do agree that the trope is annoying the same way every single princess being totally shocked and appalled when her marriage is arranged gets annoying- not because it can't be true based on history and human behavior, but because fiction treats it as some kind of universal precept. Mix it up a little sometimes! Have a Regency character who comes to the present, finds out that her favorite local cheese isn't being made anymore, and loses her entire mind!

[vidavalor]

Polari

@camdenleisurepirates mentioned Polari & Ineffable Husbands Speak, so some thoughts on that below.

I think that C&A know how to speak Polari but the most common Polari words aren't in their language as much so far I don't think-- only because Polari is meant to sound exclusionary while C&A are hiding their cant vocabulary in words that wouldn't raise alarm bells for anyone listening to them.

They know a lot of stuff that influenced Polari and ties into it a bit, like the slang of seamstresses and sailors, which are part of their speak, but saying anything like "bona" and "vada" and "omi-palone" and the like on the bench in St. James' Park, etc. was out for them or the ducks watching them would have figured out something was up.

There are a couple of Polari words that overlap with their language that they seem to be using at least a little, though. The slang of a cottage and cottaging in gay communities is also part of Polari and Crowley & Aziraphale not only know exactly what that means but it also fits into their speak easily and I'd wager they will be smirking about it in relation to their South Downs cottage for some time. It's probably a word we'll hear on different levels in S3.

To "do a turn" in Polari and sailor's slang is one way to refer to having sex. The presumption has been that it comes from the theatrical world and doing a turn on stage. (Rather amusingly, C&A are literally doing a turn on stage during their Big Damn Sexual Euphemism Bullet Catch performance in S2.) Crowley uses "turn" euphemistically in this way in 2008 in 1.01. It's actually euphemistic on two different levels-- the Polari/sailor's slang level and also a joke related to the meaning of crepes in his and Aziraphale's speak.

Polari does have a lot of food euphemisms but not really overlapping with C&A's way that much & not to the same extent (to be fair, it'd be hard for any slang to get anywhere close to the same extent lol.)

It's not specifically Polari but kind of Polari-adjacent coded language but some gay men in England in the 1950s would refer to looking for gay erotica as looking for "American" magazines/books, etc. because that had just begun to be imported from the U.S. at the time. One aspect of the use of "America"/"American" in C&A's speak is in a coded way referring to not just to the idea of freedom in general (though, that too, for sure) but to sexual freedom, which is likely tied to how that was coded language for gay men in London historically at one point. While they still use America/American that way at times, they love their food euphemisms more when it comes to their erotica collection, which Aziraphale referred to as the "cookbook section" in GO: Lockdown. (I'm still laughing over that. 😂)

This one isn't Polari in origin, either-- as it came before it-- but, in Molly slang in the 1700s, the phrase "pleasant deed" was used to describe sex between male partners. It is thought to have possibly originated prior to being used by the Mollies but exactly when & where is unknown, so... technically, it or something *very* close to it could have been around in, say, 1601 😉... in case you ever got the same vibe from this that I do:

There's also that brandy is Polari & Cockney Rhyming Slang for ass and Crowley, when talking about Jane Austen in S2, says that she was a "brandy smuggler." The Napoleonic Wars were happening at the time so the "brandy" in question is actually French brandy-- the term for which is really cognac. (Aziraphale is drinking cognac-- a much more current bottle of Courvoisier-- in GO: Lockdown.) I'm sure that Jane really did have a whole scheme going where she was getting black market cognac into England during the war-- there's always the literal and then the wordplay level in GO-- but for Crowley to refer to Jane as a "brandy" smuggler in S2 might maybe suggest that Jane was also involved in facilitating some clandestine and gay shenanigans? The phrase "brandy smuggler" alone fits C&A's speak independently of any of the other connotations as brandy is alcohol (with the word 'randy' in it, no less lol) and one part of the origin of the word smuggle is "to eat secretly"-- food & alcohol being two of the most common euphemisms for them.

There's one more off the top of my head that is more like a joke about Crowley knowing Polari than actual use of the words itself but it is tied into a couple of Crowley & Muriel scenes in S2. In Polari, there are a bunch of phrases that mean "the police" and one of them is "orderly daughters." At the same time, to "order" in Polari is to orgasm.

Muriel shows up at the door and identifies themselves as a human police officer so insistently that they tell C&A at one point that their name is "Inspector Constable." Crowley makes some jokes that he knows only Aziraphale will understand about how some cops make a "hobby" out of spying on queer people. Later on, when Crowley has Muriel arrest him to get to Heaven, the jokes he's making that are all going over Muriel's head are all related to what will "take him to Heaven"-- some things that will get him to "order", in Polari. This all works without the Polari already but it's also kind of as if Crowley's wordplay-happy mind is turning over "orderly daughters" and "order" and that's part of why he's amusing himself by self-deprecatingly telling cop Muriel that if they throw the cuffs on him and word him a bit ("you just say 'blah blah blah...''), he'll order in no time.

I'm sure there's more but that's what I've noticed so far. 😊

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (December 17-23, 2023)

Episode 7 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters laid down significant Monsterverse lore, showing the moment Monarch finally revealed itself to the public (under hilarious circumstances) and how the organization's partnership with Apex Cybernetics began. I did not find May's long-awaited backstory super compelling, to be honest, I think because the proto-Apex company was so thinly sketched. And that Frost-Vark better not be dead. :(

An incredible three Godzilla comics released last week: DC/Legendary's Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong #3 and IDW's Godzilla: War for Humanity #3 and Godzilla Rivals: Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon. The crossover lit a certain section of the Internet on fire with the revelation that Godzilla did, in fact, kill Superman the previous issue. Writer Brian Buccellato chalked it up to Godzilla's atomic breath having "a radioactive signature similar to [K]ryptonite," which as handwaves go is pretty good. Behemoth and Scylla had moments to shine as well, and the issue ended with Lex Luthor discovering a Mechagodzilla eye. Glad Godzilla won't be the only Toho character in the comic; that would've been a bit lame.

Godzilla: War for Humanity remaining a thrilling read, and the Super MOGUERA debuting in this issue is not to be missed. Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon starts with a content warning for depiction and discussion of attempted suicide, which certainly surprised me. It's another strong issue, neither callous nor didactic, and told so efficiently there's plenty of room for the titular bout (which sometimes has felt like an afterthought in Rivals stories). Also, Jet Jaguar talks—something Toho forbade in a comic earlier this year, for whatever reason. Anyway, he's exactly the 'bot you would expect him to be. Hope IDW can keep him chattering in the future.

You've probably seen my flurry of posts already, but it bears repeating: The Boulet Brothers' Dragula, a drag reality competition found on Shudder, aired a kaiju episode. Reality TV isn't my bag, but I thoroughly enjoyed the competitors' kaiju-inspired costumes and performances. I also kept ping-ponging between awe that Americans are just expected to know what a kaiju is now and yelling at the hosts for, say, not naming any kaiju outside of Toho's Big Five.

Hot on the heels of the black-and-white re-release of Shin Godzilla comes Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, which has to be the best title one of these things has gotten. As with Shin, this is no mere filter; each shot in the film was regraded, with director Takashi Yamazaki striving for "a style that looked like it was taken by masters of monochrome photography." It opens in Japan on January 12; no word yet on whether it will play in any other country.

Godzilla will follow in the steps of pop culture fixtures like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars with Godzilla: The Official Cookbook by Kayce Baker, due from Titan Books on September 10. (You can tell it's official because he's actually on the cover.) 60 recipes lie within. It's a given that I'm going to buy something Godzilla-related that's this silly; I just have to pick up another cookbook first so it won't be the first one I ever own.

I was surprised to realize that McDonald's has never done anything Godzilla-related; far less prolific fast-food chains have worked with the monster, from White Castle to Carl's Jr. The first salvo in the campaign was pretty underwhelming—BE@ABRICK figures that can only be won via lottery, with an entirely plain Godzilla. That replica MogeGoji suit looked great in the ad, at least. Tokusatsu is being kept alive in the Godzilla franchise through some truly odd means. The follow-up ad/promo was a lot better, but that's a matter for next week's post.

This is at least kaiju-adjacent—James Wan's long-gestating The Call of Cthulhu movie seems to finally be going somewhere, as revealed in roundabout fashion by a Deadline article. I thought the 2005 silent version was just fine, but presumably this will be produced by his company Atomic Monster, which is long overdue for an actual giant monster movie.

[doomspiral]

Old Black Pot and The Flour is Different were books my family already had, a friend went to New Orleans and brought me back that cookbook, the bigass German Cookbook is one I got so my grandma and I could see how our family recipes looked in comparison and discovered even more stuff we didn't realize wasn't Average American Fare. And then the Alsace and Irish cookbooks are further exploration based off family history, while the Slovakian, Hungarian, and Lithuanian books are for fun and research.

[jehanne-gaudet]

Authentic Louisiana Gumbo

Cooking time: 90 minutes

Growing up in South Louisiana I always heard about my family's older generations living in New Orleans. My mom moved to Baton Rouge in her 20s, but we're New Orleanian through and through– we have our roots traced back to Acadia, Gaudet is our family name. In highschool my mom taught me how she and her mom and her nana made their gumbo, but a few conversations will tell you that there's more "right ways" to make Gumbo than there are creole people. Here's my right way.

GATHER YOUR INGREDIENTS: I always heard that your mom was my mom's midwife when I was born, but we didn't know each other really until highschool because you lived in Lafayette. I changed my name to Johanna Gaudet during my transition, which I guess you learned through Facebook. You also chose your name when you transitioned: Marcus. Marcus Gaston. (Not like the Disney villain, it's pronounced like "GA-stun", not "ga-STAWN".) When you transitioned at 17 your parents kicked you out of their house. I transitioned while I was away for college but I guess that was around the same time, me being older.

PREP THE INGREDIENTS: In February I got a call from you. You were crying in the parking lot of the Rouse's because you'd bought some random things hoping to make gumbo based on the Emeril Legasse cookbook, but the more you grabbed the more you realized it wasn't right. You couldn't even articulate what was wrong, because your mom never taught you her gumbo recipe before she kicked you out and stopped talking to you. You tell me you feel like your whole childhood was taken from you. You tell me you hate this fucking state and can't wait to move out to Seattle. All words I've said or thought before. My dad is from Texas, he used to forbid my mom from cooking Creole food or even taking us to New Orleans where she grew up. He wanted us to grow up as his perfect white American status symbol children, and our actual heritage would have made us dirty. Joke's on him, he never expected gay and transgender kids. My mom taught me how to make gumbo after the divorce, and after I stopped talking to him. And talking about my mom's recipe some, we decide I'll come over to teach it to you. It's not your childhood or your family, but at least it's a childhood to make up for what was taken from you, the way it made up for what was taken from me.

GETTING STARTED: At your apartment, I do tell you that you won't need the shrimp. It's a chicken and sausage gumbo my mom taught me. There's other kinds, black Creoles brought over Okra gumbo, native Creoles adapted it to Filé gumbo, and my people (the formerly-French Acadian Creoles) adapted it to be made with a roux. Seafood gumbo usually is done with okra, at least in my family. I don't know where we got that recipe from– Creole people have been all mixed together so long– but pairing seafood with okra is how we do it.

PROCESSING THE CHICKEN: You'll want to start with taking out your WHOLE CHICKEN. Not leg quarters or breasts, a WHOLE chicken, WITH giblets. Just from memory, this is how to process it. You'll start by pulling the wings up and cutting along the white line of fat, and then between the bones. Next you'll pop the legs out of their hip sockets by bending the thighs opposite from how they're supposed to sit, and cutting along the fat line between the thigh bone and the hip socket there too. Next is the part I never totally remember, I think you pull the torso as open as it goes and try to cut along the fat lines on the side of the torso, starting opposite the ribs and going forward? But at some point you'll hit ribs, and I always just try to go around them. Maybe there's an easier way, I don't remember. Anyway at some point you'll get to the clavicles at the front of the chicken, and you just have to break those. My mom taught me to do it by setting the knife blade on one and just hitting the back of it with your hand until it breaks. Finally, try to cut the breast meat out of the breast bone. This is a huge pain to do, tbh. I think there's a way to split the chest bone in half and leave some bone and cartilage on there, but I just try to cut out the meat as close to the bone as I can. It's imperfect, whatever.

BROTH: Go ahead and put the breasts and leg quarters aside, but set the rest of it (mostly just wings and bones) in a big pot with the giblets. Cover it all with water and set it to boil on a low heat. By the time you need broth, this will have turned into broth. You can also supplement with even more broth from the store, if that's your inclination. I do it sometimes for no particular reason.

THE HOLY TRINITY: Anyway then we gotta cut the vegetables. Onions, green bell pepper, and celery. This is called the Holy Trinity. Actually, there's a 4th one, and it's garlic? My mom used to say that the Holy Trinity is those 3 vegetables, but the Whole God is Garlic. To me that reads hilariously like the Heresy of Partialism, but it's fine, she converted out of Catholicism as a teenager. She only pretends to be Catholic now. Anyway how much of each of the Trinity veggies? Idk, I always kind of eyeball it. I'd say like equal-ish parts of all 3, but it should be 2 or 3 cups all together? Maybe more onion than the other 2? And you definitely want a lot of veggies, because they can disappear in a gumbo. But again, just eyeball it. This part also takes the longest, it's so annoying. My mom would make me do this part when I was young so that she didn't have to, and I sometimes make my wife do it. But also you can get store-bought trinity that's already cut. As a rule I don't like store-bought stuff when I can do it myself, but I still do it sometimes.

SEASONING THE CHICKEN: Okay assuming that's done, time to season your chicken. The ones you set aside, the breasts and leg quarters. Try to get the seasoning under AND over the skin if you can. Idk if that makes a difference, but I always heard it does. I keep the seasoning here simple. Salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and cayenne. Eyeball the quantities, but know a lot of this gets cooked off into the roux, so too much won't hurt you at this stage. You'll want to get a big gumbo pot and cook the outside of the seasoned chicken. Oh, you used your only big pot for the broth. No worries I brought mine. I'll get it from my car. It's one of those dark blue pots with the white speckles on it. Dirt cheap, thin metal, but it's big and does the job. Anyway, put some olive oil in there and cook the outsides of the chicken on a high heat. Doesn't need to be cooked all the way through yet, you can take it out after a minute or so.

THE ROUX: Now we get to the actual hard part. Roux is easy to burn, and my family does it dark. Advice online often says not to do it too dark to make sure it can thicken the gumbo more, and that makes sense, I've heard that before. But my family does it dark. Like Dark Chocolate dark. I also do a LOT of roux. Roux tastes good in the final gumbo, so don't skimp. I empty your bottle of olive oil into the pot, and I bring out my bottle from home too to add some more. I brought it because I knew I'd feel bad using all of yours. You want probably like 1/2 an inch of standing olive oil at the bottom of the pot, at med-high heat. Then the flour, we want enough of that to make the roux thick. It's gonna seem too thick at first, but don't worry, it thins out. And you're gonna sit yourself over that pot in the high heat with your bamboo spatula and scrape the bottom of that pot as it gradually gets darker. Keep going until you can barely tell through the steam that it's not totally black, but you're getting afraid you've burned it. I want to be clear though, you are scraping every inch of the bottom of that pot. If you ignore one part too long you'll notice that the flour settles real low in the oil and starts to burn. So you scrape every part off, and you scrape fast. Early on you can scrape slow, but as it gets dark you gotta speed up. Probably wear a mitt too, because the oil is gonna splash and that hurts. As it gets darker I get a little nervous and drop the heat to med.

ADD THE HOLY TRINITY: While you're doing that I'm getting all the Holy Trinity we chopped together in a big bowl. Once it hits dark chocolate brown, I tell you to scooch over in a panicked voice, and then I dump in the holy trinity. Then I ask you to keep mixing it up while I get a glass of water to dump in there to cool it down so the roux doesn't burn in the residual heat. I don't get the glass glass, I get a Mardi Gras glass, obvi. I also lower the heat to med-low. At this step you notice the roux has lightened a lot. It's milk chocolate brown, now that the Trinity is in there. I add another glass or two of water as it cooks down, just to make sure the texture stays like a paste that clings to the vegetables. I tell you to keep mixing it while the Trinity vegetables cook and the onions turn clear. I add a whole mess of minced garlic too.

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER: Anyway now we add that broth. You're really supposed to skim off the foam at the top of it, but I don't always. But you should. I do it in front of you, to set a good example. And then we pour the broth over the trinity and roux trying to keep the chicken scraps from falling into the gumbo. We mix it until the roux disappears into the broth. I realize we forgot to cut up the Andouille. I tell you how annoying it was to try to find Andouille while I was in Alabama for college. There was one brand, Savannah, which was pretty good though if I could find it. People were so weird about Creole stuff in Alabama. I never fully "got" cultural appropriation until I heard rural Alabamians at a crawfish boil talk about my home all while exclusively calling me anti-Creole slurs. We use Kiolbassa's Andouille though, which has a special nostalgia for both of us. I used to wake up at 2am and cook an Andouille sausage to eat as a snack or on bread. It's like the ultimate comfort food. We cut them up into discs and toss them in the gumbo. I've heard that the sausage can soak up some of the extra olive oil from the roux, but I don't really know. Maybe you have to do something special for that to work. We toss the chicken pieces in too. They'll need to cook in the gumbo to soak up the flavor, but also to cook the insides of the chicken. Remember we just cooked the outsides.

SEASON TO TASTE: We also toss in some seasoning. A couple bay leaves, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, cayenne. You add paprika because you're suspicious of ONLY cayenne. Like won't that just have a front of mouth burn? Some paprika would help to push it backwards. Balance it more, you think. It's sound logic, I might have to do that from now on. Then we leave it to cook for a while. It already smells awesome…

RICE: Wait, shit, we forgot the rice!! Okay, we make the rice. You know the trick right? Like about measuring rice? You can measure the correct amount of water by sticking your knuckle into the water down to the top of the rice. The water should cover the entire thickness of the middle section of your finger. Which is all good and well but you have a fancy Japanese rice cooker so you just use the measuring cup that came with it. I tell you my family used to have a rice pot. Like a normal sauce pan, but we used it specifically for making rice and we sometimes left it on the stove (with a lid on it) in case we needed to reheat the rice for something. I have since heard that this was very unsanitary, but it was tradition in my family, and I just think it was cool. Anyway, we start the rice. The wait is fine honestly, this will force us to let the gumbo stew for a bit. One time, during the 3 week power outage after Gustav, my sibling learned how to make rice on a propane stove. They were so good at it, never burned a single pot. Crazy, right?

LET IT STEW: We start talking about this childhood thing. The heritage thing. You should check out Butterfly Soup, it's this queer visual novel by Brianna Lei. Or, specifically the sequel. It's about being Asian American, and like I would never want to try to claim that experience (esp as a white Creole) but there's a lot in there I think you'd like. It's like, y'know our heritage, our culture... it's not just something we're just given and have to accept. How much did we lose when we transitioned, and our families cut us off? It feels sometimes like if we want to be queer the "right way" then we have to move to the PNW, or San Francisco, or New York and work in tech and act like those terminally-online people on Discord. And if we want to be Creole then we have to be cis and straight and conservative, like your Nana who posts Q-Anon shit on Facebook. But the thing is, we don't JUST inherit our heritage. We are active participants in it. We create our culture as much as we experience it. It doesn't need to be transphobic, y'know. It doesn't need to be racist. We don't need to let ourselves become southern Americans and we don't need to accept creoleness as it was. Ain't WE Creole? It's like the gumbo, y'know, like we got our recipe from our families, but it's OUR recipe now. Our parents passed it to us, but it's our culture and our recipe to pass on. We can decide what it means to be "authentic" gumbo. And we can decide what it means to be "authentically" Creole. And that can mean trans, or gay, or whatever. And you can put the tomatoes from your garden in your gumbo if you fucking want to, it's your gumbo. It's our culture, and that's who we are, isn't it? The culture is us. The rice maker starts singing its beeping rendition of twinkle twinkle little star.

ENJOY: God this gumbo really is so fucking good. My mom really knew what she was talking about, like, sometimes.

[mariacallous]

In 2023, Tel Aviv celebrated its first ever Jachnun Festival. Celebrity pastry chefs, jachnun joints and hungry crowds gathered at the hip settings of the city’s harbor, enjoying every possible version of the humble star of the party, the Shabbat Yemenite pastry. Alongside classic jachnun, visitors could try stuffed jachnun, spelt flour jachnun and even gluten-free ones. A stand offered Yemenite spicy sauce (zhug) tastings, and another featured a chili pepper eating competition. And to wash it all down, jachnun lovers were offered spiced black coffee, and fig and date arak liquor.

Jachnun is a slightly sweet rolled pastry, made of very thin layers of dough that are brushed with clarified butter. It is the Shabbat dish of the Jews of Aden, in today’s Yemen, and is baked overnight on Friday at a low temperature then eaten for breakfast on Saturday morning. 

Israeli food writers wondered how Tel Aviv hasn’t had a jachnun festival until now, but my question is quite different: How did this unassuming pastry make its way from Aden to the heart of Israeli culinary consensus in just 75 short years? It stands there in pride alongside other classics like shakshuka, schnitzel, hummus and chicken soup. When and how did that happen?

First, to clarify, the famous Yemenite jachnun is actually from Aden, not Yemen. (Aden, which was the capital of South Yemen, became part of the country now known as Yemen only in 1990 after the unification of North Yemen and South Yemen.) The Adenite and Yemenite (mainly from around Sana’a) Jewish communities were separate and had different traditions.

Adenite and Yemenite Jews met for the first time in the Hashed (or Geula, “redemption” in Hebrew) transit camp arranged by The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1949 ahead of Operation Magic Carpet that brought them to Israel. 

“In Hashed, with ingredients brought by The Joint, is where Yemenites first learned from the Adeni how to make jachnun,” said Moshe David, an Israeli of Adanite roots, a jeweler and author of the cookbook “Disappearing Flavors of the South.”

“More Yemenites learned how to make the dish in the camps in Israel,” where Yemenite and Adenite Jews lived together for years, he told me.

For hundreds of years Aden was a cosmopolitan strategic harbor city. It was ruled by the Ottomans and then by the British. Moshe believes that jachnun originated from an Ottoman pastry called gül böreği (rose-shaped borek). The pastry is made with yufka, a thin dough, thicker than phyllo, that’s used for many Turkish pastries, and is stretched to an almost transparent leaf, then spread with fat, just like jachnun. The original gül böreği, though, is stuffed with meat, while jachnun is only brushed with fat and then rolled.

In the past, jachnun was actually served as a sweet dish, topped with honey (and later, in Israel, with sugar).

“They used to serve it with halva or Turkish delight,” said David. “That’s what convinced me the origin is Ottoman. They would also serve it with quince jam,” a testament of the Adenite connection to the Silk Road and Persian cuisine.

In search for the origins of the dish, I found an unusual version of jachnun in two of Molly Bar-David’s books. Bar-David was a Jewish American who emigrated to Israel in the 1940s and documented Jewish dishes of immigrants that arrived in Israel from all across the Jewish Diaspora. She quotes a recipe for ghihinoon (Yemenite Cakes) from her Yemenite housekeeper, Margalit, who used to sprinkle chopped nuts, jam or cottage cheese on the dough before rolling it and baking. 

I should add that the 1964 book is packed with condescending comments toward the many Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews mentioned in the book. Margalit (last name is not provided) was not spared. In general, this was in line with the way many Ashkenazi Jews at the time viewed Jews from Arab and Muslim countries.

Moshe thinks that Bar-David mistakenly mixed g’hin, “dough” in Yemenite, with ghihinoon. But when I asked a Yemenite-Israeli Facebook group about it, one member said she too spreads the dough with jam before baking. Still, most Yemenite Israelis in the group found that idea amusing, and jokingly suggested serving jachnun with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. 

Jachnun evolved into a savory course, and became nationwide phenomena, fairly recently, in the 1980s when a chain of Yemenite restaurants named Nargila (hookah) took Israel by storm. Nargila offered a limited menu, and jachnun and malawach were the stars. The pastries were served with grated tomatoes mixed with zhug, which became the standard for Yemenites and even for some Adenite Jews.

These days, jachnun is available in the freezer aisle at any supermarket in Israel, offering an inferior but easy option for those daunted by the labor-intense process of making the dish at home. On the weekends, fresh jachnun is readily available at pop-up roadside stands, cafes and even as part of the famous Israeli breakfast buffet in many hotels. This modest dish has officially become an Israeli staple.

[what-marsha-eats]

Freda DeKnight (1909-1963) was a pioneering author and editor who celebrated Black American chefs and home cooks as "Ebony" magazine’s first-ever food editor. Her book, “A Date with a Dish,” was one of the first cookbooks written specifically for a Black American audience.

[tabney2023]

Shaquille O'Neal

Shaq’s Family Style Cookbook—Championship Recipes for Feeding Family and Friends available on Amazon USA.

[officiallysoup]

Great- Great- Grandpa’s Family Reunion Stew / Potluck Meal for Hungover College Students

Do you recall the family reunions you were dragged to in late stage elementary, when your parents pretended to believe everyone still-alive on your dad’s side of the family could stay peaceful together for a full six hours. Now everyone avoids bringing them up, but on the rare occasion that it is, you have plaguing flashbacks of finding out Santa wasn’t real at the ripe age of nine, due to the words of your seventeen year old drop out cousin. Wonderful times. This recipe will haunt you for generations through the twelfth edition of the family cookbook, and can be made in a pinch for anyone!

Step 1: Go to your local supermarket with all of your saved coupons. Find the frozen food section for vegetables. Who can afford actual fresh vegetables in this economy? Certainly not you. You have student loans to pay.

Step 2: You will need a bag of frozen peas, a bag of frozen carrot sticks, a bag of frozen corn, and two bags of frozen small white potatoes. If you must, buy instead five bags of assorted vegetables. You are cooking for hungover college students: nobody really cares about vegetable choice when the final paper is due in three weeks. Skip this step if you’ve deluded yourself into buying fresh vegetables.

Step 3: Make your way to the soup aisle. You don’t need soup. You need broth. Find a broth of your choice, and pick eight cans. If you suddenly feel the spirit of Gordon Ramsey possess you, flip to page seventy nine. Aunt’s Rebecca’s chicken broth is to die for, as demonstrated by her fourth husband.

Step 4: When you’ve set up your crockpot, pour in four bags of vegetables. The fifth is for your headache after you realize you are still seventeen sources short for your senior thesis. Set the temperature to 280*F, or 138*C if you didn’t go through an American public high school. Dump all of the ingredients together in the crockpot and let cook for two hours.

Step 5: During this time, open your computer and prepare to work on your paper. When the timer on the crockpot rings, you will realize you spent a majority of the two hours watching cat compilation videos. This is where the final bag of vegetables can be used for the incoming headache. Ibuprofen can be used instead if you foolishly bought fresh vegetables.

Step 6: Choose an assortment of spices. It is recommended to use salt, black pepper, garlic, and onion powder, but Italian seasoning and cayenne pepper will do as well. If you are still unsure of what spices will work, under no circumstances should you call Uncle Jack. Just because you always made grilled chicken skewers for the reunion, Jack, doesn’t mean you know how to season them. I mean, who puts just salt on chicken? At least I put parsley and paprika on the broiled chicken wings. There’s a good reason my wings’ recipe is in this book and not your grilled skewers.

Step 7: Stir in the spices well. Let cook for another hour.

Step 8: This meal can be enjoyed with shredded cheese, and eaten hot or cold. Bring this to whichever college party you’re off to attend in hopes you might forget about all of the looming deadlines, and it’s sure to be a treat. Nothing cures a hangover like cold stew for breakfast, or an email from a professor regarding your absence in class today. Reply to the professor and say you had car troubles.

okay which one of you projected onto a soul recipe

[intertexts]

HIIII ROS i am sorry i never replied to your reply to my ask from a while ago i am so bad at that ;-; in response to that kinda (bc we were talking about jhariah) i did see them live! 3rd concert ive ever been to in my life & it was life changing... i was front row n there was a baby mosh pit n i was with my best friends it was so good <3 i didn't get to see all the songs off TRUST CEREMONY live but if he tours again i will try to get tix because i must see CONTROL BABY live... my faves are control baby n fire4fun n russian doll <3 but it is my fave album ever created (except maybe Måneskin's Teatro D'Ira vol 1)

Dont wanna yap too much but other music im liking rn: Dua Saleh's ROSETTA ep; Missouri Surf Club's songs Rotten & Kingdom Come; Jean Dawson's entire discography generically but specifically SICK OF IT* and New Age Crisis; Ethel Cain's everything; and then im still consistent w the narcissist cookbook, an unkindness, sons of the illustrious father etc. I have been getting into a crazy amount of music since summer started though so there are sooooo many others but i wanna know what you're listening to! i like your music taste as ive said :3

ANYWAY I think i might just send another ask because this is ramble-y n u dont have to reply to it bc its overwhelming but!! Yeah hehe okay p. 1 - mare

HII HI HI no worries!!!!!!! all good i'm also really terrible at it!!!!!! hehe <33 jhariah concert & mosh pit is SO awesome though.. man.. thats so cool.... love that experience for u!!!! <333

checking out all of these rn they're SOO GOOD.... dua saleh ROSETTA ep literally going on the repeat playlist rn omg. ough. how have i not heard them before. holy fucking shit. missouri surf club goood i love the florence influence.... jean dawson & ethel cain WHOO!!!! hell yeag. god. u also have such good music dude. good shit.!!!!!!!

what have i been listening to!!! shit!!! this is gonna be LONG but u asked for it!!! a lot of morcheeba (big calm), de la soul (the grind date), sneaker pimps (bloodsport), tricky (maxinquaye) <- one of my all time faves, madvillainy, cibo matto (viva! la woman), yaeji (with a hammer), chai (wink)... summer to me is usually very hot & humid & sticky & dreamy to me (busted ac) so this is my laying on the floor staring at the fan vaguely dissociating rotation.

other than hip hop & trip hop-- dragon new warm mountain i believe in you by big thief!!!!!! somehow never listened to this one & i'm ill over it. & july flame (other all time fave) by laura veirs & central reservation by beth orton (<- huge recent discovery ill over her voice) & broken social scene self titled for my acoustic rotation...

heavier set: been getting BIG into creature feature they're literally so fun. i think u might like them tbh. american gothic is my fave so far!! summer is for shitty pop punk 2 me!! esp. when i actually have to Do Stuff & not lay on the floor melting. so. we the kings, fall out boy (cork tree & infinity on high), the cab, the academy is..., yellowcard, motion city soundtrack, alkaline trio :]

ALSO special mention 2 blue sky black death (slow burning lights, late nite cinema, noir) bc their instrumentals make me so insanely nostalgic & have been my writing soundtrack for the past month!!!!

[mosquito-queen]

kate opening the door to her apartment and immediately on high alert. the entire thing looks like the 50% discount section of holiday decor and smells like a paula deen cookbook. she’s reaching for the weapon she keeps tucked along the coat rack when she’s confronted with the ghost of christmas present: “kate bishop! it was so sad and lonely in here. i fixed your american christmas for you!”

kate scowls, snatching the collapsable bow, “yelena? what? it’s july.”

the blonde is undeterred, her grin only widening. kate hasn’t seen her since the fight, but it’s hard to hold onto her anger when yelena is wearing a santa hat and a ridiculous holiday sweater. yelena grabs a bottle off the table, “you americans have... what do you say? christmas in july? besides, i owe you a drink.” the black widow takes a step towards kate, who instinctually takes a step back, knocking into the closed door. 

on the impact, bells chime above her head. kate glances up, and then quickly back at yelena, her face suddenly very warm. she’s a different kind of nervous now, attempts a joke to clear her thoughts: “did they run out of garland?” 

“kate bishop, do not try to play cool. you are doing no favors for yourself.” she’s close enough now that kate can hear her breathing. she tries to remind herself they’ve been closer. that definitely does not help, and instead makes her heart jump into her throat. she coughs and yelena smirks. 

the black widow takes mercy, “come, come. we will have a drink now. and i will consider leaving through the door afterwards...” kate is surprised by the slight hesitation before yelena finds her footing once again, “only if you will give me a goodbye under it.”

yelena’s nose is scrunched, a dusting of pink across her cheeks, a rare vulnerability pressed in the corner of her mouth. kate’s brain short-circuits. the bow clatters to the floor as she grabs at yelena’s sweater, and in the surprise, yelena stumbles hard into kate. they catch their balance against the door again, the mistletoe bells ringing lightly. 

it’s messy, nothing like their fights, but the feeling is there. they bump noses, kate taking the plunge and kissing yelena first. for all her talk, the black widow is still under kate and the archer is about to pull back, to stutter an apology, to run out of her own apartment. but then, yelena’s hands are cupping her jaw and kate can only think about the way she tastes. they pull back panting, yelena’s eyes are wide, and she jokes: “or, i suppose a hello works too.”

this time kate smirks, “stop pretending you’re not surprised, yelena. it doesn’t look cool.”