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Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books network. I am Dr. Nakaziotes, the host of the channel. It's an honor to introduce this living legend, Dr. Jessica B. Harris. She is a culinary historian and she is one of the pioneers of the African American food waste studies. She has authored over 17 books over the course of her 40 year career. One of her most widely read works is High on the Hog, which inspired the hit Netflix show of the same name. She joins New Books to discuss her latest book, braided heritage. Welcome Dr. Harris, to the show.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Thank you so much for that wholesome introduction, Kazi.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Oh, you're absolutely well deserved because you are A living legend. I begin these interviews with guests telling me and the audience a bit about themselves. And I learned through some other interviews that you were part of a group that aimed to infuse traditional Newsroom with the spirit of the black arts movement. Can you tell me a bit about your experience with that?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Wow. Traditional Newsroom. I'm not quite sure. We were just at that point, very young. And as you no doubt know, when you're young, you think you can move the world, build the world and change the world. And so at that point in time, which was the very late 60s and early 70s, I had some friends from high school who were actually involved with a show on PBS called Soul. It was, you know, it was Hayslip, and it was very much a landmark show. And they were involved in the production and all of the rest of that. And we would get together periodically at the offices and talk about this and that. And at some point, somebody decided, well, let's take. It was like a supermarket shopper magazine, and it was called the Black American. And they proposed to the publisher that we do a supplement that would focus on the black arts. And it was certainly a time of the black arts movement. And as some of the people were actors, some were photographers, and, you know, we went on and proposed that we would write about various different disciplines. I think I was the book review person because I was the one that was reading everything that came out. And I discovered I could get three books if I did book reviews. So I did book reviews. And that ultimately is how I started writing. Because after about a month or six weeks of this, I was the only member of the group that was still going up there to turn in articles. That's how it happened. And that's, you know, kind of why it happened.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
And how did you find your way to ESSENCE and what did it mean to be shaping stories for and about black women? Particularly at a time when few national platforms existed for that particular work, that.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Black American work where I did interviews and book reviews, the book reviews morphed into interviews. And somewhere parallel along with that, I started writing for the New York Amsterdam News. I did theater reviews for them and then took these sort of portfolio of these articles and went first to Encore Worldwide News and Report, which was a more news magazine that was started by Ida Lewis, who was the original editor at essence. And then when I had a portfolio that was large enough, went to essence. I don't know what prompted it, but I went to Essence, and at that point, Marsha Ann Gillespie was the editor and sat down Spoke with her and ended up becoming, I think, the book review editor, in essence, if I remember correctly. And I could be dead wrong, but I think that's the genesis of it all. And from book reviews, I went to. Well, I went to doing general editorial stuff. I did several feature articles. Always tickled to have been one of the first people. I think I probably was one of second person to do a lengthy piece on Toni Morrison and interviewed her back in the 70s and when she was at Random House. There's that new book out, Tony at Random House. And I'm looking forward to reading that. Cause that's a period in time that I remember. And then from the features and the book reviews, you know, an occasional stuff hither and thither ended up becoming the travel editor. And travel led to food. And that's how it happened.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
You know, I once heard you say that you identify yourself as a journalist and not a writer.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
People are in the process of talking me out of that.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Okay.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
But I mean, it's certainly at my beginning, I was journalist. You know, a writer is something I am working my way to being comfortable with. I mean, what I usually say is what I am is a professor, a teacher, and the writing and the whatever else it is all comes out of that. In a way.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
What makes you uncomfortable about saying, identifying yourself as a writer?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, I think some of it is because in my formative years, that is to say, the 70s, early 80s, I knew people who pretty much defined what writing was for much of the 20th and the 21st century. So Toni Morris and James Baldwin. I am not a writer. When you stack me up with them, at least I'm not to myself.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
You know. Over the decades of writing about food, what has surprised you the most about the power of food writing?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, I'm still learning about the power of food writing. I mean, and it is powerful in certain areas and not all of them. You know, for many people, being a cookbook author is not writing it. Because for so many years it was for most cookbooks about recipe, not about story or background or history or any of those things. I mean, and I'm not a chef, so I don't fit in that either. But what I do is use. Use food to talk about history in a way. So I guess the term culinary historian or food historian is the thing that most applies.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
It's so incredible that you have had all these experiences and traveled the world and had so many different entry points into journalism. One of the questions that I ask every guest is to take a moment to Reflect on the fullness of their life. And to name a moment where you had self doubt and point to a place in your career where you had the greatest achievement, what would those two things be for you?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Goodness. The self doubt is probably yesterday or this morning or any point in time. I am in many ways uncomfortable with whatever this is that's happening. So self doubt is very much a part of that journey. Imposter syndrome is real attainment. I'm not sure. I got a lifetime achievement award from James Beard. And the interesting thing about that is that none of my books ever won an award. And I got the lifetime achievement award during COVID so I didn't get to go to a ceremony. But the year afterwards, which I guess would have been 2023, I'm not even sure I was asked to host the James Beard Media Awards. I did. And then as they had me introduce the media award winners to the audience at the James Beard Chef Awards, Chef and restaurant awards, they happen on two different occasions. But in the same weekend, I went out onto the stage of the Lyric Theater in Chicago and got a standing ovation. And I'm still thinking about that and wondering about that and parsing that out in my life.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Really?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Yeah. It was just a lovely moment, a feeling of attainment and possibly acceptance.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
A lifetime achievement award speaks to the body of your work, as opposed to naming a singular work. It's the breadth of your scholarly and cultural production that gives recognition among your peers, but then also for the field and for the discipline.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Yeah, not arguing that. Just it's, you know, it's a funny process.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
I bet. I absolutely get it.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Yeah.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
I want to talk about braided heritage. In the introduction, you titled it, quote, three is the magic number. Where did you come up with the magic number of three?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, there was a show on TV called Schoolhouse Rock.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Yes, yes, yes. I do remember that, Dr. Harris.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
And I was a fan of Saturday morning television when I watched television. And Schoolhouse Rock was a particular favorite. And I have, in fact, used it when I was teaching English. Freshman English. So as I was trying to think about, you know, what was the foundational food of the United States, and that is the braid, that song just kept coming back. It was kind of organic process. The genesis of the book was a speech that I gave in Natchez, Mississippi, decades ago, trying to think about the United States and what that was, or in the case of the Natchez speech, Mississippi, and what that represented, I kept coming back to the fact that there are these three foundational, if you will, cultures that have built or that are at bedrock. Not to say the only, not, you know, because there be dragons and I don't want to be fussed at, but the bedrock because they are the kind of points of initial contact for the stuff that came together to form this country. And so it's certainly Native American, European American. And on the points of contact, you're looking at the seaboard. So Europeans being the Spaniards, the British, the Dutch, or the people from the Low Countries, I sort of subsume them into the Dutch, but the Netherlands, as in Netherlands for the rest of the Europeans, the French. So for the Europeans, the Spanish, the British, the Dutch, and the French, and then the enslaved Africans who were, you know, not necessarily coming here voluntarily.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
You know. Much of your work has explicitly centered on the African diaspora foodways. But Braided Heritage widens for a broader and more entangled American story. What compelled you to enter into this expansive culinary history?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Braided Heritage is a book that I was kind of asked to write and I came off the podium from the presentation at the Cunard Professionals Organization. An editor came over and said, you know, that sounds so much like a book. Could you write a proposal? I would like to entertain the idea of buying this book. And I was like, yeah, sure. And she did buy the book and then ultimately left the publishing house. It's a long and convoluted story, but the end result was that that book turned out to be Braided Heritage. So it is, and probably unique in my books in that it is one that I was asked to do. And I can't say I didn't completely do it, but, you know, it's just different being asked to do something and forming another iteration of what was in fact my idea, but not my idea as a book.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
About sharing their New York Times accounts.
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Commercial Narrator
My name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't and it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in wordle or connections.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Thank you Dana. We heard you introducing the New York Times Family Subscription1 subscription up to four separate logins for anyone in your life.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Find out more@nytimes.com family as you describe it, that the contributions of indigenous peoples, Africans and Europeans are all cultural threads that are woven together through history. And I'm fascinated by this concept of a braid. And to me, when I think of a braid, I see it as a thing that involves tension and intimacy. What do you think defines American cuisine? Is it the shared ingredients? Is it the power dynamics between them or the way survival shapes innovation across communities?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, I would probably say, although I am using your words now, the way survival shapes creation, because that's kind of how it happens. For me, the braid is also all of those tensile things that you talked about, but it's three equal things that come together to form something different that is, in a funny way, stronger than any of the individual parts that went into it.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
When I read the book, and particularly your introduction, it made me think about the concept of fusion, and I want to explore this here in a deeper way. Would you consider American cuisine one of the first authentic fusion cuisines? Not fusion in the trendy or modern sense, but in a deep historical way born from the collision of survival, in the need to create something from many worlds at once?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, I mean, I think that that is ultimately what all food is. Don't know that that's an American story, American in the sense of the United States. It's certainly a story of all the food in this hemisphere, but it's also, you know, the story of the foods of the Indian subcontinent. I mean, where would that be without the Dao trade and the, you know, the spices and the individuals and everything that comes from Africa, from the Arabian Peninsula. As we start to look at food in general, that's one of the things that makes food history so compelling is it's always about a fusion of some sort. You know, the Italians say we taught the French how to eat, right? You know, so, I mean, that's fusion.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
In the book, you profile some of the chefs and culinary historians representing the cultures of American food. So let's talk about some of them.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
There's only one, well, two professional chefs in the book, and that would be Sean Sherman and Julianne Vanderhoop. And those are the only two chefs. The people that are profiled in the book are really, just for want of a better way of putting it, Rabbit's friends and relations. As I thought about this concept and as I was working at getting the proposal together, it was like, well, you know, if we're going to call this a braid, if it's going to be tripartite, how are we going to get these recipes? What are we going to do? I didn't feel that I was the one that should be defining them. So, surprise, surprise. Jessica had friends in all of the categories. And so I literally opened my address book and called friends, did interviews with pretty much the same questions for all of them, and asked them for between four and six recipes that they felt were either their family go tos or that they felt defined their culinary antecedents. And so that's kind of how that happened.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
So talk to us about some of them. So the first one is John Barbrey.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Barbary is actually a friend that was introduced to me by friends because it's like, oh, you need to talk to John. Each of the. And there are 11 different people, four native peoples, four Europeans, one each from the Spanish, British, Dutch and French. And then for African Americans, and for African Americans, I didn't talk about points of origin because that can get very fluid. So what I did for African Americans was I talked about different trends that I thought or different vectors maybe that represented African American culture was innovation, migration. And then because we so connect African American food with the South, I wanted to be contentious, which does happen occasionally. And so had a friend whose family had no Southern roots and so spoke with her. So that was how that chapter came together. And the final fourth person in the African American chapter is myself. John Barbary is a Tunica Biloxi, and they are from southern Louisiana. And he is tasked within his tribe with working at bringing back the language. The last, I think fluent speakers died decades ago. So that, you know, that's part of what he does. Every person in the book has a kind of subtitle, and his is Cultural Warrior because he's very much fighting to, as are most of the native people's profile, fighting to maintain and document and remind people of their Cultures and heritage. So that's John Barbery. And his recipes are interesting because they intersect with. With a lot of southern Louisiana food, as you know, as do his memories. You know, there is a precise from him, but there is also a precise from a lady named Lenny Sorensen. And Lenny is African American. And I've used her for migration because Lenny is mixed race. Her mother is white, and her father and stepfather are both from southern Louisiana. I think I know her stepfather's from southern Louisiana. I may have misspoken about her father, but the point is that Lenny has a Greek essay in her recipes that she offered. That's a very close parallel to the prique essay that John Barbary gives. So you got all of that, you know, connection and tension.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Right?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
That's right there.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Talk to us about Peter Rose.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, Peter is the anomaly in that she is American. She's an American citizen, but she was not born here. She is actually Dutch. She's the only person who is not just, you know, representing a group that came, but who is Dutch. So the interesting thing about Peter Rose is that she is the culinary historian of record for Dutch food in the America, in the United States. She is the one that has translated many of the handwritten records and recipes from the old Dutch into English and who really has laid the bedrock for, you know, what is any study of Dutch food and the Dutch food of New Netherlands. In that sense, she was just absolutely the perfect person because she not only knew recipes, but gave recipes that harked back to the traditional.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
And talk a little bit about Abigail Rosen McGrath.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Oh, yeah. Abigail is my great regret because Abigail died in December and never got to see the book. So I am deeply unhappy about that, to say the least. But Abigail is an African American who didn't have Southern roots. She only went down to the south as an adult. I went south only as an adult. I'm not a child that got sent south to visit relatives during the summer, but there were relatives. Abigail is actually Dorothy west, the Harlem Renaissance writer's niece. And her mother, Helen, sometimes is spelled Helene Johnson, was also a poet of the Harlem Renaissance in the period just following that. But they are out of Boston, and Abigail was raised in New York City. So no Southern roots. And her recipes reflect it. Recipes like salmon poached in milk and sardine sandwiches and B and M baked beans and, you know, Johnny Cakes and things that really speak to a Northern sensibility.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
What are some key ingredients that are representative of the cultures that you identified in the book?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Oh, goodness. Well, anybody who knows Me knows I'm going to say okra for the Africans. Interestingly, I would say wheat for Europeans and certainly corn for Native Americans. I mean, those would be three major ones along with wheat. We forget that there were no pigs in this hemisphere until Columbus. So all of that pork barbecue is already braided. You've got, you know, the traditional means of cooking that owe much to the African continent, let me put it that way, and a meat that is essentially European. So, you know, you get all of that kind of braiding, all of those kinds of things that come together.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
What is a dish that you highlight here in braided heritage that blends all of these cultures? You mentioned the animal product and a while ago you mentioned the free cassette. But what dish could you point to that blends strands from indigenous peoples, Europeans and Africans?
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, there is in the book a southern succotash. And it's why traditional succotash is sort of like lima beans and squash and corn in a southern succotash or in the southern succotash that's in the book, which is, I think the one that I grew up with. It's okra, corn, tomatoes, and there may be a bit of bacon flavoring it. And so the bacon, as we've just spoke of, is the pig, which is European. The corn is Native American and the okra is African. So you've got all three things in one.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
The last question that I have for you, Dr. Harris, is tell me what you are currently working on.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
I am working on two new food related projects and then I'll, you know, and one of the food related projects is about my family and its relationship to food and the food history of the United States. Third is I am working, I think I'm going to see on a novel. So we'll see.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
Oh my goodness.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, you never know. You that writer.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
That's right. Just shake that pressure off of yourself, Dr. Harris. The expectations of what is a writer, Professor Toni Morrison would often say, and I'm paraphrasing here, to get the white gaze off of your back. And I just think about, in this case, not the white gaze, but think about the sort of pressure that may actually exist but may intensify in our own doing of the expectations of what it means to be this once. When we lift ourselves from those things, that's where we find the beauty. That's where we find curiosity. There's something beautiful about self naming. And you know, you are what you say you are and you absolutely are a writer of a different genre. And Let you flex out those writing muscles and writing skills in this novel project if it should flow your way.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, thank you so much for that. I will take that much to heart.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
And one last thing, Dr. Harris. When I asked about self doubt and attainment and you mentioned the James Beard lifetime achievement and how you are making sense of all of that, it sort of reminded me of James Baldwin. He never got the validation in his lifetime and it's evident he desired that. I just mentioned him because after Mr. Baldwin's passing, his words have been quoted in so many spaces, including in the academy, his books. In fact, I took a class in my master's program on Baldwin. He was like one of three separate courses that I had on a single African American writer. That course on Mr. Baldwin as a religious writer. I just want to say that it's something special to be recognized while you're still alive. So you can still receive and smell the flowers and actually see who's giving you the flowers too. I think about that with the lifetime achievement award from the James Beard foundation and your work.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Well, there is a lovely picture that somebody took of me that the Beard folks sent me. And I look at the picture and the picture makes me smile because the picture is me signaling upon the receipt of all of that love and adulation. Just how grateful I am.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
And I'm grateful for you. Dr. Jessica B. Harris is a culinary historian. She has authored over 17 books over the course of her 40 year career. One of the her most widely read works is High on the Hog, which inspired the Netflix show of the same name. Her latest book is Braided Heritage published by Clarkson Potter. Dr. Harris, thank you so much for being on the show. I am truly honored and grateful for our conversation.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Nikasi, thank you so very much. It's been my absolute pleasure.
- [37:46]
Dr. Nikazi Oates
Special thanks to David Hawk. I'm your host, Dr. Nikazi Oates. Thank you for listening. Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Oh, come on.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Whatever.
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Dr. Nikazi Oates
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.