Cuisine
MAY 2022 50 JARITA MORE
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FRAZIER-KING
LEARN
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USES STORYTELLING
STICK SPICE
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EDUCATE ON
COOKING CLASSES
NATCHEZ FOODWAYS
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Soul Fusion Natchez
AT THE NATCHEZ HERITAGE SCHOOL OF COOKING, CHEF AND FOUNDER JARITA FRAZIER-KING IS BUILDING COMMUNITY AROUND FOOD Story by Lauren Heffker • Photos by Taylor Cooley
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he signature dish of Natchez chef and community activist Jarita Frazier-King—black eyed pea and collard green fritters topped with a sweet and spicy chili sauce—contains much more than its pan-fried cornmeal contents. It’s also a story, a memory, resilience and struggle. Southern soul food is built on dishes like this, what Frazier-King describes as “hard times food,” cheap and filling and borne out of necessity and her ancestors’ ingenuity. Through the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking, which Frazier-King founded in 2017, she shares the story of a place and her own within it, providing layered and little-known historical context on the origins of traditional Southern foodways. Frazier-King focuses on the African diaspora, including the enslaved people who worked on the plantations in Natchez and throughout the South, which is inextricably tied to her own family history. “We teach people about the roots and history of soul food dishes, particularly what we call “‘classic cuts’ of soul food,” said Frazier-King, “and how the African 50
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Americans and Native Americans influenced most of the food that we eat here in the South, the same food we eat today.” This cuisine is known for its down-home authenticity, generational legacy, and above all, objective classification as “comfort food,” and beloved for all the same reasons. Frazier-King was raised in the kitchen, having spent the majority of her formative years watching her mother and grandmother cook for anyone and everyone who came through their front door—learning the ways in which feeding people was its own kind of love language. When her time came, she would prepare food in just the same way. Her grandmother, Beulah Fitzgerald, was born one of fourteen children, so Frazier-King grew up around a dinner table crowded with cousins. “I’ve been standing up on a stool cooking since I was five years old,” she said. Frazier-King’s family roots run deep in Natchez, the oldest documented settlement on the Mississippi River. An eighth-generation Natchez matriarch, the mother of three can trace her lineage all the way back
to the original union that spurred countless Creole descendants. In fact, Frazier-King’s family tree is on display at the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum preserves the cultural and historical contributions of African Americans to the growth of Natchez, from its inception to present day. “I like to say, it’s like stories on a plate, because it’s a more meaningful experience,” said Frazier-King. “I want everybody to share the same experience I had growing up whenever they come here.” The heritage school is wholly a family endeavor—Frazier-King works almost exclusively with immediate and extended family members to help put on the week’s workshops and heritage tours, fulfill catering orders for private events, and serve local customers at their burgeoning pop-up restaurant, Soul Food Fusion Natchez. Upon earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Alcorn State, the historically Black university in nearby Lorman, Mississippi, Frazier-King went back to work for her alma mater managing its community out-
