Marcus Samuelsson

On The Rise

Marcus Samuelsson writes Black cooks back into American history

BY TARA Q. THOMAS

In February 2020 Marcus Samuelsson was riding high. He was opening Red Rooster Overtown in Miami, the 13th restaurant in a portfolio that spans from New York City to Bermuda, Montreal, Sweden and farther afield. He had recently launched his second season of “No Passport Required,” his PBS show that explores the multicultural foodways of the U.S., and was in his 23rd season as a judge on the Food Network show “Chopped.” He had also just about wrapped up his eighth cookbook, “The Rise,” which highlights the contributions of Black Americans to American cooking. Then came COVID-19.

To anyone outside of New York City, it might be difficult to imagine just how hard the pandemic hit the city. It wasn’t just the fear of the unknown or the weirdness of the silent streets. It was how the air filled with the sound of sirens wailing, the low rumble of refrigerated morgue trucks underlining their urgency. It was how the streets became quieter while the sidewalks got busier, lined with people waiting for meals at food banks, and the distance between reading the news and living it got shorter.

The virus’s toll was especially high in Harlem, where Samuelsson lives. People were contracting the virus and dying of it faster than anywhere else in Manhattan. The number of people out of work and standing in food lines also ballooned. Samuelsson, who had to abandon the Miami opening and shutter his restaurants, partnered with José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen to transform his flagship Red Rooster Harlem into a community kitchen. He also galvanized the restaurants that had signed up to be part of Harlem Eat Up!, an annual food festival, to do the same.

When I catch him on the phone one September morning, with more than 100,000 free meals served behind him and still no hopes of in-person dining anytime soon, I expect to hear someone exhausted and exasperated by the pandemic, but he sounds preternaturally relaxed, even cheerful. Zion, his four-year-old is shrieking with delight in the background, playing with his mom, Maya Haile—and to top everything off, schools still aren’t in session. But Samuelsson is focusing on the bright side. “Our block has done some amazing stuff, with kids and parents coming up with all sorts of solutions— drum classes, drawing on the street. It’s been a positive out of a really negative time,” he says.

While the pandemic has canceled any chance of an in-person book tour, he views the timing of “The Rise” as another positive. “We started this journey four years ago, when I walked into my publisher and said ‘hey, we have to figure out how to broadcast what African American chefs and writers have done for the American food scene,’” he recalls. “Back then, food equity was not the hottest topic. But if there’s ever been a moment to look at what we are doing, it’s now. COVID impacts people of color, it impacts poor people, it impacts Americans with less access to health care in a completely different way [than it does people of means].” Those people, of course, happen to make up the bulk of our essential workforce—the ones keeping the hospitals running, the transit systems moving, the Amazon trucks delivering, and the farms, restaurants, cafés and grocery stores feeding America. “If we’re going to come out of this, we have to engage with one another as human beings better,” Samuelsson says.

For Samuelsson, food is a powerful way to engage, and his hope is that “The Rise” will foster connections by giving voice to people and histories that many of us didn’t know. To cast as wide a net as possible across generations, geography and Black American experiences, he engaged Osayi Endolyn, a young writer focused on food and race, to profile 27 Black Americans working in the food world today. Between these essays, he sprinkles in his own stories, vignettes of people he has worked with and learned from throughout his career. Every one of the profiles is accompanied by a recipe, created with the help of Yewande Komolafe, a Lagos-born, New York-based recipe developer, honoring each person’s personal histories in vivid flavors.

The result is a cookbook that’s as fascinating to read as it is to cook out of. It’s likely that you have already heard of some of the featured individuals, like Leah Chase, who fed luminaries ranging from Duke Ellington to Thurgood Marshall and George W. Bush at Dookey Chase’s in New Orleans for the better part of her 96 years; or Toni Tipton-Martin, the first Black American woman to run the food section of a major newspaper, who is now the editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country. Maybe you watched Eric Adjepong on “Top Chef,” or read about Kwame Onwuachi, who won the 2019 James Beard Rising Star Chef award at D.C.’s acclaimed Kith & Kin.

Others you may have never heard of—and you may wonder why— such as Eric Gestel, who has been an essential part of New York City’s most vaunted seafood restaurant, Le Bernardin, since 1996. A native of Martinique, Gestel moved to a small town just outside of Paris, France, at age 12 and by 14, he was apprenticing to be a chef. It was while he was working at Joël Robuchon in Paris that he met Eric Ripert, who would go on to become the face of Le Bernardin, cementing its reputation as one of the world’s greats with three Michelin stars and a four-star review in the New York Times. Gestel has been part of that process since Ripert’s early days in the kitchen, and became executive chef in 2015.

MARCUS SAMUELSSON WITH HIS WIFE, MAYA HAILE, AND SON ZION.

“Recipes are rituals. They’re more than an ingredient list and a series of steps. They’re personal meditations, small celebrations. They connect us to loved ones we remember well and those we wish we had known.”

—Marcus Samuelsson

RECIPE AND PHOTOS FROM “THE RISE” BY MARCUS SAMUELSSON WITH OSAYI ENDOLYN; RECIPES WITH YEWANDE KOMOLAFE AND TAMIE COOK ©2020 REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF VORACIOUS/LITTLE BROWN. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANGIE MOSIER.

There’s Chris Williams, who has been drawing people to Houston’s Museum District with his take on Southern food at Lucille’s since 2012. He points to his great-grandmother, Lucille Bishop Smith, as a primary influence. She launched one of the country’s first college-level commercial cooking programs at Prairie View A&M University in 1937. She went on to establish a thriving business based on her hot-roll mix—the first commercial biscuit mix—and became the first African American woman on the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

Samuelsson’s hope is that these profiles will inspire people to wonder why we haven’t heard about these people, or about some of the ingredients used in the recipes. Why isn’t berebere spice on the shelf along with the curry? Why don’t we ever see ayib, an Ethiopian fresh cheese that’s as easy to make at home as fresh ricotta or labneh? (You may want to change that up when you taste his sweet and spicy roasted carrots with creamy ayib, or the sweet potato–ayib ravioli in berebere brown butter.) Why is it that we have gone to great lengths to create gluten-free pancakes instead of turning to injera, an Ethiopian flatbread made with teff, a naturally gluten-free grain? In “The Rise,” he uses it as a vehicle for a silken salmon salad, showing how easy it can stand in for pita, tortillas or savory pancakes.

“Food is highly political,” he points out. “The food that the Europeans wanted they reclaimed as theirs, so the cocoa beans from Ghana became Belgian chocolate, coffee beans from Ethiopia and Kenya became French roast or Italian espresso.” Other foods have become so ingrained in American culture that their African origins are rarely thought about, like the peanuts that fill peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the watermelons that show up at summer picnics. Or Carolina rice, a vastly successful industry in the early days of our country that was built on the expertise of enslaved farmers from Africa’s Rice Coast.

This lost history has a real cost, Samuelsson says. “It does two things: It changes the economics [of the foods] and it also changes what we value as good: We decided that polenta is good, but fufu is not; that mashed potatoes are good, but fufu is not.” (Note the recipe he gives in “The Rise” for mangú, a Dominican version, might single-handedly change this. Made from plantains mashed with sweet potato, cinnamon, jalapeño and coconut milk, it’s far more exciting than plain potatoes.)

This has a personal cost for Black Americans, too, he points out. “Once you start seeing these stories on traditional platforms, whether it’s TV, radio or magazines, and you don’t see your own story, there’s no value to it.” Or, where you do see it, it’s hurtful, as in the “Mammy” figure on Aunt Jemima bottles; the image of “Uncle” Ben on the rice products now called Ben’s Original; or the cheery Black chef on Cream of Wheat boxes, an image that grew out of a caricature of an illiterate enslaved man called Rastus. Only this past summer, after waves of Black Lives Matter protests, were these images and names finally being phased out.

Maybe the most powerful argument for reading “The Rise,” however, is how it illuminates the power of food to tie us to our origins and to bring us into the future. The stories that fill the book reflect experiences that we can all relate to as Americans—of preserving our family histories in the foods that we cook, tweaking them here and there as they move with us over time and space. As Samuelsson so eloquently puts it in his chapter on migration, “Recipes are rituals. They’re more than an ingredient list and a series of steps. They’re personal meditations, small celebrations. They connect us to loved ones we remember well and those we wish we had known. … No matter how much we bring with us to our destination, something gets left behind and we inevitably adapt to, and bring our own change to what’s around us.”

It’s the same sort of layering that gives rise to new music, which he credits with showing him the way forward as a young cook. “When I heard A Tribe Called Quest or stuff like that, it was the first time I was like, ‘wow,’ you can draw from the past like that, you could sample something from old and make something new of it,” he says. “Since cooking is such an old craft, in that you’re always drawing from something else, hip hop helped me understand that that was ok to put a twist on it.” You could think of the recipes in “The Rise” as a mixtape, each cut layered with influences accrued over time and space: The roasted cauliflower a tribute to New Orleans chef Nina Compton ringing out like “a brass band, a second line, the Neville Brothers, and Lil Wayne” and the complex, diverse elements of Island Jollof Rice (shared here) jamming to an Afrobeat harmony. “America is extremely diverse, extremely layered,” Samuelsson says, “and therein lies the beauty of America.” 

Island Jollof Rice MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS

When I think of Eric’s [Adjepong] food, I think of the West African dance called the highlife, full of Afro beats and guitars and brass instruments. The syncopation of the music moves you. Eric and his wife have a catering company in D.C., but most of America knows him from “Top Chef.” He represents the new African chef who gives a nod to the past, but also to the future. When you eat his food, you can taste that blend and complexity. He brings the African food tradition he grew up with into everything he does, and he does it in the most modern and beautiful way.

This rice dish is inspired by Eric and his Ghanaian roots. I eat it and hear the trap beats of “Pour Me Water,” a big Afro beat song. It’s layered and deliciously complicated in your mouth. Jollof rice is such a beloved dish that every West African takes ownership of it. Nigerians and Ghanaians especially squabble on who makes it better and where it was first created. Historians believe it was actually created in Senegal, but that doesn’t stop the competition.

Jollof Rice 2 cups jasmine rice 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 3 tablespoons chopped peanuts 3 slices turkey bacon, chopped 1 large red onion, diced 3 cloves garlic, minced 1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped 1 Scotch bonnet (or habanero) pepper, stemmed and minced 1 tablespoon tomato paste 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 cup canned crushed tomatoes 1 cup shredded white cabbage 4 ounces smoked fish, such as mackerel or trout 1 carrot, diced 1 cup water 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk 1 bay leaf 2 sprigs fresh thyme 2 teaspoons curry powder ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 teaspoon ground cumin

juice of 1 lime 2 scallions, chopped 2 small tomatoes, chopped 1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Spinach 3 tablespoons palm oil 1 red onion, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1 boneless, skinless chicken thigh, chopped 1 red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and chopped 1 Scotch bonnet (or habanero) pepper, stemmed and minced 1 teaspoon five-spice powder 1 cup canned crushed tomatoes 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk 1 teaspoon dried crayfish powder (See Editor's Note) 4 ounces smoked fish, skin removed and coarsely chopped 2 cups packed spinach, chopped 2 cups packed mustard greens, chopped

1. For the rice: Place the rice in a colander or fine mesh strainer and rinse under cool water for 5 minutes, or until the water is clear. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan set over medium-high heat. When the oil shimmers, add the peanuts, bacon, onion, garlic, ginger, chili pepper, tomato paste and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3 to 4 minutes, until the onion is translucent. 2. Add the rinsed rice, crushed tomatoes, cabbage, smoked fish, carrot, water, coconut milk, bay leaf, thyme sprigs, curry powder, cayenne pepper, and cumin. Stir to combine and bring to a simmer. Cover and decrease the heat to maintain a low simmer. Cook for 10 minutes, or until the rice is just tender. Remove from the heat and allow to sit for 20 minutes. 3. Remove the bay leaf, thyme sprigs, and fish and discard. Stir in the lime juice, scallions, chopped tomatoes, mint and parsley. 4. For the spinach: Heat the palm oil in a large sauce-pan set over medium-high heat. When the oil shimmers, add the onion, garlic, ginger and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3 to 4 minutes, until the onion is translucent. 5. Add the chicken, bell pepper, chili pepper, and five-spice and cook, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through. 6. Add the crushed tomatoes, coconut milk, crayfish powder, chopped smoked fish, spinach, and mustard greens and stir to combine. Decrease the heat to low and simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the greens are tender. To serve: Top the rice with spinach. Editor’s Note: For the crayfish powder, you can substitute shrimp paste, powder or other fish sauce, and adjust amount to taste.