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Iron Pots & Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking
Cajun, Creole, and Caribbean dishes all have their roots in the cooking of West and Central Africa; the peanuts, sweet potatoes, rice, cassava, plantains, and chile pepper that star in the cuisines of New Orleans, Puerto Rico, and Brazil are as important in the Old World as they are in the New World. In Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, esteemed culinary historian and cookbook author Jessica Harris returns to the source to trace the ways in which African food has migrated to the New World and transformed the way we eat. From condiments to desserts, Harris shares more than 175 recipes that find their roots and ingredients in Africa, from Sand-roasted Peanuts to Curried Coconut Soup, from Pepper Rum to Candied Sweet Potatoes, from Beaten Biscuits to Jamaica Chicken Run Down, from Shortening Bread to Ti-Punch.
Enticing recipes, a colorful introduction on the evolution of transported African food, information on ingredients from achiote to z'oiseaux and utensils make this culinary journey a tantalizing, and satisfying, experience.
Enticing recipes, a colorful introduction on the evolution of transported African food, information on ingredients from achiote to z'oiseaux and utensils make this culinary journey a tantalizing, and satisfying, experience.
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1989
4 people are currently reading
248 people want to read
About the author
Jessica B. Harris
29 books237 followersAccording to Heritage Radio Network, there's perhaps no greater expert on the food and foodways of the African Diaspora than Doctor Jessica B. Harris. She is the author of twelve critically acclaimed cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora including Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking, Sky Juice and Flying Fish Traditional Caribbean Cooking, The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking, The Africa Cookook: Tastes of a Continent, Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim. Harris also conceptualized and organized The Black Family Reunion Cook Book.Her most recent book, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was the International Association for Culinary Professionals 2012 prize winner for culinary history.
In her more than three decades as a journalist, Dr. Harris has written book reviews, theater reviews, travel, feature, and beauty articles too numerous to note. She has lectured on African-American food and culture at numerous institutions throughout the United States and Abroad and has written extensively about the culture of Africa in the Americas, particularly the foodways. In the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, author John Mariani cites Harris as the ranking expert on African American Foodways in the country. An award winning journalist, Harris has also written in numerous national and international publications ranging from Essence to German Vogue. She's a contributing editor at Saveur and drinks columnist and contributing editor at Martha's Vineyard magazine. In 2012, she began a monthly radio show on Heritage Radio Network, My Welcome Table, that focuses on Food. Travel, Music, and Memoir.
Dr. Harris has been honored with many awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Foodways Alliance (of which she is a founding member) and the Lafcadio Hearn award as a Louisiana culinary icon from The John Folse Culinary Academy at Louisiana's Nicholls State University. In 2010, she was inducted into the James Beard Who's Who of Food and Beverage in the United States.
Dr. Harris holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Queens College, New York, The Université de Nancy, France, and New York University. Dr. Harris was the inaugural scholar in residence in the Ray Charles Chair in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans where she established an Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. Dr. Harris has been a professor of English at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. for more than four decades. She is also a regular presenter at the annual Literary Festival in Oxford, England, a Patron of Oxford Gastronomica at Oxford/Brookes University in Oxford, England, and a consultant to the Lowcountry Rice Culture Project in South Carolina. She is currently at work developing a center for connecting culinary cultures in New Orleans.
In 2012, Dr. Harris was asked by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to conceptualize and curate the cafeteria of the new museum which is being built on the Mall in Washington DC that is scheduled to open in 2015 and is a member of the Kitchen Cabinet at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The Heritage Radio Network sums her up saying, "Doctor Jessica B. Harris damn near knows it all when it comes to African and Caribbean cuisines and culinary history. She's a living legend". Harris lives in New York, New Orleans and Martha's Vineyard.
In her more than three decades as a journalist, Dr. Harris has written book reviews, theater reviews, travel, feature, and beauty articles too numerous to note. She has lectured on African-American food and culture at numerous institutions throughout the United States and Abroad and has written extensively about the culture of Africa in the Americas, particularly the foodways. In the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, author John Mariani cites Harris as the ranking expert on African American Foodways in the country. An award winning journalist, Harris has also written in numerous national and international publications ranging from Essence to German Vogue. She's a contributing editor at Saveur and drinks columnist and contributing editor at Martha's Vineyard magazine. In 2012, she began a monthly radio show on Heritage Radio Network, My Welcome Table, that focuses on Food. Travel, Music, and Memoir.
Dr. Harris has been honored with many awards including a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Foodways Alliance (of which she is a founding member) and the Lafcadio Hearn award as a Louisiana culinary icon from The John Folse Culinary Academy at Louisiana's Nicholls State University. In 2010, she was inducted into the James Beard Who's Who of Food and Beverage in the United States.
Dr. Harris holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Queens College, New York, The Université de Nancy, France, and New York University. Dr. Harris was the inaugural scholar in residence in the Ray Charles Chair in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans where she established an Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. Dr. Harris has been a professor of English at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. for more than four decades. She is also a regular presenter at the annual Literary Festival in Oxford, England, a Patron of Oxford Gastronomica at Oxford/Brookes University in Oxford, England, and a consultant to the Lowcountry Rice Culture Project in South Carolina. She is currently at work developing a center for connecting culinary cultures in New Orleans.
In 2012, Dr. Harris was asked by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to conceptualize and curate the cafeteria of the new museum which is being built on the Mall in Washington DC that is scheduled to open in 2015 and is a member of the Kitchen Cabinet at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The Heritage Radio Network sums her up saying, "Doctor Jessica B. Harris damn near knows it all when it comes to African and Caribbean cuisines and culinary history. She's a living legend". Harris lives in New York, New Orleans and Martha's Vineyard.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 27, 2021
Iron Pots Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking (Paperback)
by Jessica B. Harris
January 5, 2015
The book openings with
“There is a crescent, a sinuous imaginary line that begins on Mauritania’s coast and sweeps downward along Africa palm fringed beaches from the buff colored sand dunes of Senegal and Mauritania, through the lagoons of the Ivory Coast and beyond, to Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, then down to the forested regions of countries with names like drumbeats: Congo, Gabon, Angola. This same line continues to sweep across the Atlantic, carrying with it music, gesture, speech, dance, joie de vivre, and yes, food. On the other side of the Atlantic it washes ashore on equally palm-fringed beaches….”- Jessica Harris, Iron and Wooden Spoons
And thus, begins this triumphant nutritious, cultural, and spiritual journey of words, not just about the cuisine of the African Diaspora, but an insightful sampling of endless tales and ancient histories across the globe, including migratory patterns that, five hundred years before Columbus, locate Africans in the Americas and Asia, where chili peppers ubiquitous in African pots, coconut trees, sweet potatoes, and maize, were brought back to African shores and spread throughout the continent.
The migration continues with Africans being inhumanly captured on their soil, where the substandard diets fed to them in the hauls of slave ships on those fateful Middle Passage journeys, upon arrival, combined with the food traditions they carried to the New World that revolutionized American culture.
Countless lives of colonists, who suffered diseases from vitamin deficiencies, were prolonged by the introduction of numerous vitamin-enriched African vegetables. The hybridization of so many African dishes also transformed often bland European sustenance (prone to spoilage) into everyday gourmet meals that, with African spices, injected endless kaleidoscopes of flavor and, additionally, greatly extended the life of dishes.
Harris’s amazing achievement further traces these transatlantic journeys to the Caribbean and Latin America where Garifuna Culture was forged, introducing “cassava and pigeon pies for breakfast, conch soup for lunch, and barbecued jerk hog and black crab pepper pot for dinner” in the most remote Indigenous and Maroon villages to the massive sugar plantations and regular homes throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
One of the most profound aspects of this book is what separates Afro-cuisine from all others: its deep rootedness in spiritual practices, making it truly “Fit for The [Goddesses] Gods". Big house cooks on plantations from New Orleans to Martinique, to Haiti, and down to Brazil’s Bahia countryside, generally had special privileges, including what was one of the most valuable – the independence to leave the plantation, where they often opened small culinary
“lean-tos” in the rural surrounding towns. What their enslavers did not know was that many of these cooks were also Gro Mambos who bartered meals to their people, which not only greatly supplemented the often meager plantation rations, but was also very important comfort food. These lean-tos soon became culinary and cultural “ring shouts” that kept the people spiritually and culturally connected so they could sustain and thrive during one of the darkest epochs in world history.
Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons reminds us that through food, where ever we stand, from the numerous American Barrios, to New York’s five Boroughs, the Midwest urban hubs and prairies, to Louisiana’s parishes, and to the rest of the Delta plains, that we are all connected at the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table.
This book belongs in every kitchen library, because every kitchen should have its own separate library
“There is a crescent, a sinuous imaginary line that begins on Mauritania’s coast and sweeps downward along Africa palm fringed beaches from the buff colored sand dunes of Senegal and Mauritania, through the lagoons of the Ivory Coast and beyond, to Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, then down to the forested regions of countries with names like drumbeats: Congo, Gabon, Angola. This same line continues to sweep across the Atlantic, carrying with it music, gesture, speech, dance, joie de vivre, and yes, food. On the other side of the Atlantic it washes ashore on equally palm-fringed beaches….”- Jessica Harris, Iron and Wooden Spoons
And thus, begins this triumphant nutritious, cultural, and spiritual journey of words, not just about the cuisine of the African Diaspora, but an insightful sampling of endless tales and ancient histories across the globe, including migratory patterns that, five hundred years before Columbus, locate Africans in the Americas and Asia, where chili peppers ubiquitous in African pots, coconut trees, sweet potatoes, and maize, were brought back to African shores and spread throughout the continent.
The migration continues with Africans being inhumanly captured on their soil, where the substandard diets fed to them in the hauls of slave ships on those fateful Middle Passage journeys, upon arrival, combined with the food traditions they carried to the New World that revolutionized American culture.
Countless lives of colonists, who suffered diseases from vitamin deficiencies, were prolonged by the introduction of numerous vitamin-enriched African vegetables. The hybridization of so many African dishes also transformed often bland European sustenance (prone to spoilage) into everyday gourmet meals that, with African spices, injected endless kaleidoscopes of flavor and, additionally, greatly extended the life of dishes.
Harris’s amazing achievement further traces these transatlantic journeys to the Caribbean and Latin America where Garifuna Culture was forged, introducing “cassava and pigeon pies for breakfast, conch soup for lunch, and barbecued jerk hog and black crab pepper pot for dinner” in the most remote Indigenous and Maroon villages to the massive sugar plantations and regular homes throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
One of the most profound aspects of this book is what separates Afro-cuisine from all others: its deep rootedness in spiritual practices, making it truly “Fit for The [Goddesses] Gods". Big house cooks on plantations from New Orleans to Martinique, to Haiti, and down to Brazil’s Bahia countryside, generally had special privileges, including what was one of the most valuable – the independence to leave the plantation, where they often opened small culinary
“lean-tos” in the rural surrounding towns. What their enslavers did not know was that many of these cooks were also Gro Mambos who bartered meals to their people, which not only greatly supplemented the often meager plantation rations, but was also very important comfort food. These lean-tos soon became culinary and cultural “ring shouts” that kept the people spiritually and culturally connected so they could sustain and thrive during one of the darkest epochs in world history.
Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons reminds us that through food, where ever we stand, from the numerous American Barrios, to New York’s five Boroughs, the Midwest urban hubs and prairies, to Louisiana’s parishes, and to the rest of the Delta plains, that we are all connected at the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table.
This book belongs in every kitchen library, because every kitchen should have its own separate library
August 12, 2013
Harris got her PhD in Performance Studies at NYU, which is very closely related to the Cinema Studies department. I mean that literally, because when I did my graduate work there in Cinema Studies we shared space and even a cross discipline professor. Showcasing an impressive array of African-inspired recipes this cookbook also includes the history and folklore of the dishes. This is invaluable from an African cultural and spiritual perspective, and the recipe for Cocada Branca is one of my favorites. The foods here are delicious and well conceived, I recommend this book for anyone's culinary library.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews