When Food Tastes Cosmopolitan: The Creole Fusion of Diaspora Cuisine: An Interview with Jessica B. Harris

This interview was conducted June 24, 2006, in Brooklyn, NY.

HARRIS: Madrugaba el Conde Olinos
Mañanita de san Juan
A dar agua a su caballo
En las orillas del mar . . .

FRA-MOLINERO: My God . . . "El Romance del Conde Olinos." That's a Spanish fourteenth-century poem. Black women and children in Latin American countries sang it until a few decades ago [to commemorate the feast of St. John who is Ogun in the Yoruba-based religions in the western hemisphere], the orisha of iron and wisdom. The poem takes as normal what seems impossible: to bring a horse to drink in the salty waters, the sea.

NERO: Jessica, you are fluent in traditions of Europe, Africa and its Diaspora, and especially those culinary traditions. You have written ten cookbooks, and most of them are about African-derived cuisines. Tell us more about your intellectual biography.

HARRIS: In addition to [the cookbooks], I have done a translation of a play by [the Guadeloupian writer] Simone Schwartz-Bart called Ton Beau Capitain, "Your Handsome Captain." I've done a guidebook to France. I did a French kind of intermediate textbook called La Vie Aillieurs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989) I co-authored and co-edited that with Beverly Pimsleur, whose husband did the C'est la Vie thing. I did a Guide to France and Guide to Paris for Bantam in 1989. Oh, and the same year that The Welcome Table and The Kwanzaa Keepsake came out I did a Third-World women's beauty book called The World Beauty Book (San Francisco: Harper, 1995) . . . and that's that!

NERO: You told me that actually you began your career as an undergraduate, doing theater.

HARRIS: Not even as an undergraduate. I went to the U.N. School [elementary school] as the first non-U.N. connected person allowed to go there. So, I grew up with all these wonderful folks from all over the place. That probably set me up for the food, and the future, and the history, the love of travel, and the rest of it. Following that, I went to the High School for the Performing Arts and majored in Theater. Then I went to Bryn Mawr and majored in French. I did a junior abroad with Sarah Lawrence. I did a graduate degree in Nancy, France, at the Université de Nancy. I went with a program that was given by Queen's College, and I came back and finished my masters at Queen's College, and I went to NYU. I did Performance Studies, which was the old Theater Criticism Department. At some point in time, you know, I took a couple of courses, because you know I thought I would meet somebody, go off, get married and have 2.3 kids and live in the suburbs . . . Didn't meet anybody, and got as far as ABD and let it go. Then my dad was very ill, diagnosed with cancer, so obviously he was not going to make it. So there were two things that were going to make him very happy. Either get married—there wasn't a chance in hell—or get the degree. So I went back after an almost ten-year leave of absence and got the degree in1983.

NERO: And your professional career as a writer?

HARRIS: That's another peculiar story. I told you I've got lots of interesting tales. Following the High School of Performing Arts, when I got out of college, I had a group of friends, former high school friends of mine who went on to different colleges who were working for Ellis Haizlip who did Soul for PBS.¹

NERO: Soul was a wonderful program of black culture.

HARRIS: It was just incredible. All of those folks from Soul and I got together in what was a kind of Black Arts Movement, and we founded a group called Roots. We were going to take over a black newspaper published in Harlem, called The...