DINNER FOR 30 A Cooking Booklet Based on a
Live Storytelling & Cooking Event Designed & Edited by Cornetta Lane
DINNER FOR 30 A Cooking Booklet Based on a
Live Storytelling & Cooking Event Designed & Edited by Cornetta Lane
Copyright Š 2017 by Cornetta Lane All rights reserved. Dinner for 30 is a project of Stories & (_). http://dinnerfor30.strikingly.com http://storiesand.strikingly.com Designed and edited by Cornetta Lane Photos by Cornetta Lane Cover photo by Leigh Ann Ulrey Story by Satori Shakoor Recipe by Doreen Bethel Made in Detroit, MI.
Savory smells waft through the air. Delicious meal plated. Stories emerge from the dinner table. Boisterous laughter fills the room. Souls and bellies full.
Dinner for 30 encourages participants to bridge cultural divides through live storytelling and cooking. On September 30, 2017, we hosted a prototype Dinner for 30 at OneMile Detroit, a cultural anchor in the North End neighborhood. We invited Satori Shakoor and her sister Doreen Bethel to participate as storyteller and cook. Doreen prepared "Potlikker" - a dish with greens, pork, and cornbread -- while Satori told a story about why this dish is significant to their family. We learned a lot from the experience, and hope to recreate it starting February 2018. We will host five events and will design a Detroit Story Cookbook. This recipe booklet is a prototype of the cookbook. It includes the featured recipe, brief biographies, and a summary of the story. We hope you enjoy it! For more information about the upcoming season, please visit our website: http://dinnerfor30.strikingly.com
Satori Shakoor
Doreen Bethel
The Storyteller Satori Shakoor is an artist, storyteller and a social entrepreneur. She is a 2017 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow. She has received recognition as a singer/recording artist with George Clinton, Parliament/Funkadelic and as one of the Brides of Funkenstein. Ms. Shakoor is an actor, standup comedienne, published writer and a produced playwright. She hosts the Twisted Storytellers podcast produced by WDET Radio with a second season scheduled for October 2017.
The Home Cook Doreen Bethel and her husband, Gregory, are pastors of Word of Light Christian Center Church. Mrs. Bethel is an event planner and Creative Design Consultant for Exquisite Details Events LLC. She loves to cook, and learned by watching older women in her family as she was growing up. The dishes they made were more than delicious; they were fulfilling, satisfying and full of love.
A Look in History A southern American dish with greens, pork, and cornbread. Potlikker refers to the "broth" left over from the pot. During American slavery, white masters wanted the cooked greens, but they ignored the potlikker. Slave cooks understood the high nutritional value of the broth and used it to feed their own families. Today, we celebrate the history of this dish.
The Dish Prep time: 20 min | Cooking time: 1.5 hrs | Serving size: 4-6 people
The Ingredients 1-1/2 - 2 lbs Collard Greens 2 large smoked ham hocks or 4 smoked turkey tails and 1 smoked turkey leg 1 large onion chopped 2 tbsp salt 1 tbsp black pepper
4 cups of water 2 tsp onion powder 1 1/2 tsp garlic powder 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (optional) 1 tbsp vegetable oil (optional) 1/4 cup sugar (optional)
The Directions 1. In a large pot, bring 3 quarts of water to a boil and add meat, salt, black pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 1 hour. 2. As meat is cooking, wash greens thoroughly. Cut off the stem, roll greens and chop into 1/2 to 1-inch thick slices. 3. Check meat to see if it "falls" off the bone. If it does, add bunches greens to the pot at a time. With every bunch, add a pinch of onion powder. Stir. 4. Cook greens until desired tenderness. 5. Optional: break off bite-size pieces of meat into the greens and remove bone. 6. Optional: add small amounts of oil, red pepper, and sugar to taste. Stir. 7. Stir, remove from heat. Serve with hot sauce or vinegar.
For a vegetarian/vegan dish, omit the meat and substitute water for vegetable broth.
The Story I grew up in a religious cult, nothing dramatic like Jonestown or Kool-Aid suicides. It was more like a mutant strain of Baptist. My uncle was the religious/cult leader and everybody did what he said do, including my father who was born in 1900. My father, Billy owned a two-family flat on the east-side of Detroit and he and his wife, Sadie, my stepmother, lived downstairs and my mother, Annie Lou lived upstairs with my two younger siblings and me. It was a polygamous situation arranged by my uncle. I was very close to Sadie who babysat us while my mother worked. My mother was much younger than my father and Sadie and worked as a maid in Grosse Pointe. There was literally no air between Sadie and me. I loved her with a passion. We would sit on the front porch and to my delight, she would pour stories and songs in my ear! Sadie was a master storyteller. She could make going to the corner store sound like Lord of the Rings. So I wasn't sure whether her food tasted that good or whether the story she told about how good the food was going to taste made it taste that good. Bottomline, it tasted great, like love.
Sadie, like all of the folks in my uncle's church, was from the Jim Crow South: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Little Rock, Arkansas. They brought their recipes, traditions and ways with them, which were a throwback echo from slavery. There was one particular dish I remember they all made. It was called Potlikker. Potlikker was the broth or the juice from the mustard and turnip and collard greens they would season to perfection and boiled. As research and history tell us, the slave masters didn't want the broth from the greens. They only wanted the greens, so the slaves were given the leftover broth, the Potlikker and that was the best part! It was the most healthy because all the nutrients that were boiled out of the greens were in it. They served the Potlikker with cornbread or hot water cornbread and it was delicious! So when I remember this particular meal, I remember my stepmother, Sadie and her legacy of love and those old women and men that raised us. Though I didn't inherit the gene for cooking, I'm fortunate that my sister, Doreen did. As the legacy of this dish continues through her cooking Potlikker greens, they stimulate my memories of my childhood, Sadie and her love that is still um-um good!
"Dinner for 30 is an authentically Detroit experience." - Chase Cantrell, Developer
Cornetta Lane is a cultural entrepreneur. She created Dinner for 30 to help break down barriers that keep strangers from becoming friends. Follow her on Twitter: @NettaLane
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