Food That Feels Like Home
A conversation about Black food traditions
Edited by Lisa Barnett de Froberville
Illustrations by Rebecca Daublin
Like any rich food culture, Black food is not a monolith. While preparing for this forum, Dr. Dé Bryant, professor at Indiana University South Bend, reminded me of the many threads running through this complex culinary cloth: traditions from Africa and the American South, of course, and also from the Caribbean, the Muslim community and recent immigrants from all over the globe. She graciously agreed to moderate a diverse panel of locals sharing their stories about family, meaning and identity in Black food traditions.
Dé Bryant: I'd like us to start with a quick round robin. Who are you? What brought you here?
Lisa Harris: I was born in Denver, grew up in South Bend, Indiana. I moved away after high school. I came back about 11 years ago, and in my travels and through school, I learned a lot about the environment and environmental policy, and then I got distracted by culinary school. So I went through culinary school in Vermont, became a chef for a little bit, and then came back here, and I've been going back to my environmental roots. I wrote for Edible Michiana for a little while. I love food, and I’m starting to tell people that food is my first language.
Dé Bryant: That's a nice language!
Nimbilasha Cushing: I’m certainly the oldest person here. I was born in St. Louis, but I grew up—my formative years, like from 3 ’til 14, almost 15—in Tennessee, western Tennessee, with my grandparents. They raised me after my mother had died when I was 2, so my first exposure to cooking would be my grandmother, whom we called Big Mama for a couple of reasons: She was big, and everybody called her that. Big mama or Cook, because there was always a pot of something going, and people knew that they could stop by, especially on Sunday, and there was going to be enough to share. In South Bend—I've been here since 1980—right now, I'm really involved in the getting-out-the-vote thing. So I call myself an activist, although compared to some people in the community, I'm not. But I do what I can do on that aspect.
Church is probably the biggest factor in my life. When I’m not volunteering in the community, it's something with my church. So that's pretty much me. I'm retired, so I used to have a lot of free time, but word gets out that you're retired and all of a sudden, you're busier than you ever were when you had a job—and nobody's paying me nothing!
Johari Lweno: I was born and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I moved to South Bend six years ago. I’m a member of the Islamic Society of Michiana (ISM). Sometimes I sell and cook samosas and chapati, the famous East African pastries. Because I am a woman, cooking is part of my culture. In Swahili we say mwanamke jiko, a woman is a kitchen. A kitchen is something that unites the whole family. So, as a woman, I am required to learn and know how to cook. I was raised by both my stepmother and my birth mother. They are both good cookers, and they both taught me how to cook. My father, he wanted me to know how to cook as part of my training as a woman. Since I was young, I had to be in the kitchen, to learn how to do things in the kitchen.
Cooking for me is—is me. It's Johari. I love cooking, I love the art of cooking, and I embrace whatever my parents taught me. So, I love it. I went through difficult times and cooking helped me to go through those times. I used cooking as a therapy. I use cooking in different forms.
Olyvia Searcy: So, we do a couple of things. By day, I actually work for a credit union in town in corporate, and then by weekend and evening we own a barbecue catering company here in South Bend, called Mad Bull BBQ. We've been operating for the last two years, and it kind of just grew a lot faster than we were ready for. It's a blessing. We don't complain—if you would have told me what we've done in the last two years, two years ago, I would have been, “Well, that won’t happen. That’s a five-year business plan.” So we’ve been extremely blessed. Thank God for that.
So, for what brought us to this conversation: For me, same as Johari, I grew up cooking. My family is originally from Canton, Mississippi. My grandmother came from a family of 18 brothers and sisters—lots and lots of cousins—and I was telling someone the other day I think all the Steward women, I’m sure, know how to cook. I could not think of a female cousin, great cousin, aunt, that didn't know how to cook, because I think it was just put in us from a very young age, and so I had those southern roots. My grandfather is from Arkansas. I have another grandfather that's from deep Florida. So it's in me.
I probably learned how to do black-eyed peas and white northern beans at 8. And that's just because my mother was a single mother. But my grandpa raised us. So Grandpa started to get old. My sister, who is three years younger than me, got diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at 7. So I was 10, and Mom was at the hospital. Between the 7-year-old diabetic in the house and Grandpa who’s getting older, someone had to learn how to do those things, and that fell on 10-year-old me. So very, very young, Pop-pop would stand over my shoulder. He'd be like, “That ain’t enough salt” or “Girl, you're gonna burn down the house!” so I credit him with my ability to season.
I love food. I love all food. Not just southern food, even though that’s “home” to me, but really all food, all ethnic food. We’re big foodies, and I think that's one of our favorite things to do together, is to explore some type of new restaurant, something we haven’t had before. I would say that’s probably how we fell in love, through food. We met in a restaurant—we met serving.
DaiVaughn Searcy: I grew up in Niles. After high school, I moved all around the Midwest—had some stops in Milwaukee, Chicago, Kansas City, Grand Rapids—and just had a lot of friends in different places as well. One thing I used love to do, everywhere I went, was eat barbeque, all over. I grew up with barbeque, it was definitely my first food love—second food love.
I grew up with my great-grandmother. She was from the South. She was a maid for a prominent family here in South Bend. Every time we went to her house, everything was on the table, making everything from scratch—from pie crusts, from beans to everything. The house was smelling wonderful. It was also a small house. The living room was pretty much the kitchen. So you were in the kitchen!
And also my stepdad, he was from Memphis. He came up here when he was a teenager with his recipes from grilling. He was famous for his Memphis-style ribs, which definitely played a part with me getting into barbeque myself. It started off where we would have ribs on holidays, then every day, especially in the summertime.
Dé Bryant: All right. Full disclosure: Dé Bryant don't cook. I don't cook. I eat, and I give all due honor to the person who did the cooking. And I'm going to look forward to seeing the recipes that are going to come from this. But I won't even lie and claim that I will try a single one. But you invite me whenever you decide to make these recipes, okay, so I can come, and I can give due honor, and I can be as happy as a clam as I’m there eating. I’m not really sure how I came to be in this conversation other than I am an unapologetic foodie, and so I’m happy to be able to talk to people who do food and have stories to tell about food.
And since we only have a short amount of time to get to all of the stories—we've begun to just kind of scratch the surface—what I want us to do is to talk about how food is home. It gives us a certain smell, and smells evoke certain memories, and maybe it's a one-pot dish that was always a part of the spreads. I hear you talking about that dish somebody made, and maybe there's these wars that happen in the family about who makes the best whatever it is. Is it mac and cheese, is it that onion casserole? Is it black-eyed peas? What is it, this one-pot dish that evokes for us a sense of home? Or maybe it's an ingredient like fish, or rice, or sweet potatoes, or something.
Tell us the story of that dish or that ingredient that makes you feel like home. And home can be this place that everybody gathered, or it might be that dish that everybody in the family keeps trying to duplicate, but we can’t, because Grandmama brought it over from the home country, and she, like our grandmama, we called her Momma Little Bit. She's taller than I am—most people are taller than I am—but we called her Mama Little Bit because she really was the smallest of them before I came along, and bless her heart, she gave us everything in the recipe except one ingredient, so it never quite tasted like hers. But she would pat us on the back and tell us how good it was, and there'd be that secret smile. We didn't find out until much later that we were doomed to failure, but we had great fun making stuff.
So what's the story? What's your story?
Nimbilasha Cushing: Well, before anybody else makes that claim of not being a cook—I don't cook. I haven't cooked probably in 10 years. I feel it's my duty, my responsibility, now that I know, to look for this young couple and their restaurant. I’m the queen of take-out. But that's not how I grew up. Certainly not how I grew up. For me, when I was growing up, anything that Big Mama cooked—and unlike your grandma, Dé, it wasn’t that she would leave out an ingredient. She never measured anything, so she couldn't tell how much salt or pepper or cinnamon or whatever she had put in the butter roll, which was my grandfather's favorite dessert, which is kind of like a fluffy pastry. The inside is a little bit doughy, but it's exactly what it sounds like. Lots of butter. It's swimming in butter. That was one of his favorite things.
But coming home to her house on Sundays. Of course, after we spent half a day in church we would come, and she would have prepared most of the food the night before, and it was just heating up. The thing that was so curious to me about her: We lived in the country. We were sharecroppers. I don't know if you guys know what that is, but that's where we had no running water in the house, anything like that. So we carried water to wash everything in the tub, or whatever washtub outside, but she had a wood stove that she cooked on top of. She cooked in the oven with not a gauge about what temperature or how long—and there was nothing peculiar to her, that's what the women that I grew up with did, who were like my grandmother. And they could just put down! We always had a nice vegetable garden, so there were always plenty of vegetables. She was great with the typical things: collard greens, mustard greens …
She had an English pea. I think we just called them green peas, but she called them English peas. They grew in our garden. She had a special dish that she did with that, that was just—I know that there was onion in it, and salt and pepper. But there was something else that made those peas like nothing else. I've never tasted a pea like that before, but coming home— it's not been the same. And she's been gone—I'm 73 now, I was 20 when she died—so she's been gone a lot of years, but I've never had that same sense of coming home, and all the gatherings I might have had, there was just something missing. And I think—I know for one thing, we were so poor that it wasn't—we were never hungry, though, but we were poor—but on Sunday there was always enough for us, and my Uncle Pate, who had been drunk from the night before, but knew where to come—to go to the cotton field on Monday, he would come and eat with us. Uncle Charlie would come and eat with us and a couple of other men who were single men, and not all just single men. But they came, and they ate.
So if I could replicate anything that my grandmother made, it would be—I've never had a piece of corn bread like the corn bread that she made, and I love corn bread. I would love to do my grandmother's corn bread, and I know a lot of it had to do with the skillet and the lard. You melted that in the skillet.
We always had sweet potatoes. We grew them out back. They were in a separate part of the garden, because the vines can just get all crazy, and I was probably a young adult. Maybe when I went in the Air Force I heard about yams, and I thought: What the heck, I've been calling them sweet potatoes! So I just say, well, that's like what's the difference between a bucket and a pail, a sweet potato or a yam. But my grandmother, she would bake them, again with the lard, rubbing the skin of them and putting them in that oven with no temperature on it, not knowing. I don't know how she knew when to take them out, but she did, they were always perfect, and then, of course, you just opened it up and put butter on it. That was it. That was great. Candied sweet potatoes she would do not every Sunday, because they weren't always in season, but in season there would certainly be candied sweet potatoes. She always did them on top of the stove, in a big skillet. She had one skillet for corn bread, and then there was like a skillet for everything else, basically. But that corn bread skillet, nothing else was ever cooked in there. But her candied sweet potatoes! We didn't have brown sugar, so I know that the only sugar she used was white granulated sugar on them, and cinnamon and nutmeg, and maybe some allspice. Butter, of course. But, as I say, she never measured anything, so you know I never could do the sweet potatoes.
But anyhow, my first home would be at my grandmother's table. There have been some others since. But there was something different about that feel that just can't be replaced.
Olyvia Searcy: I was thinking in my head, it’s so hard, you gotta pick one! I was literally in my head, trying to debate. That's hard, because you know I would want to go with collard greens, I would want to go with my Aunt Meat, and we called her Aunt Meat because she was big. Wheelchair-bound and big. But she did all her cooking from that wheelchair. As long as you could move her around, she was able to cook and stir from that wheelchair. That’s amazing to me.
But it would probably be tomato gravy. I found out that, normally, this is Mississippi tomato gravy. I didn't grow up knowing what that was. I knew that Grandma canned a lot, and she always used to tell me—she grew up with like 18 brothers and sisters, so they were poor in Mississippi, especially in, I call it Swampland, Mississippi. I visited once, and not for me. It's hot! But she would always say, when they didn't have a lot, her mother, our great-grandma Cooney, would always get a jar of tomatoes. And she would put that jar of tomatoes down with some seasoning, some onions—she would either use okra as a thickener, or flour if she didn’t have okra. We were always using that to thicken some type of soup or gravy. And she would spoon it over hoe cakes, it would be spooned over white rice, fresh biscuits.
And what was so interesting about the tomato gravy to me is that I've always been able to eat it with something sweet—I can eat it with sweet biscuits—but I can also eat it with savory. I can also enjoy it just over white rice. So when I was younger, before she died, and Momma was at the hospital working midnights, we had that for breakfast. You know, fire is on, I’m eating hoe cakes and tomato gravy for breakfast and that's fine. It was my grandfather's favorite thing for her to cook for him before he went out the door. That's what he wanted. He wanted some fresh biscuits and tomato gravy, either made fresh or left over from the dinner before.
It's always done in the cast-iron skillet. I personally have never not made it in a cast-iron skillet. I probably would not want to do that. I probably could, but I don't want to. It’s always been in that cast-iron skillet and typically we always make it after frying something. It's always made in the same skillet with some type of protein that came before it. So whether that's cube steak—the chewy steak, the cheap steak, the poor man’s steak is what I used to call it—fried chicken or fried pork chops, you always pour off the majority of that oil, but you always leave the burnt stuff, the remnants and oil in the cast-iron, and then I start to build in my gravy, chopped onions, flour. And now that I’m older and I have my own sense of taste, I do more fancy things. I’ll add some rosemary in there or a sage leaf. Things that grandma wasn’t doing but to build those flavors.
We actually ended up putting it on the barbeque menu. We do it as a special: We will do brisket and gravy, and we spoon it over chopped fresh brisket, and that's always really good. You can eat that over anything. It's very filling. So I think for me, if any time I’m eating tomato gravy, it's really hard for me not to think of her. I really am sitting here trying to recall, do I ever eat it and not think of my mom, not think of Gramma Lou, her name was Loudors, or Great-grandma Cooney, or Aunt Meat, or Aunt Sebay—you know, all these crazy Mississippi women—I have to think of them.
I remember making it for him when we first started dating, because he thought I was crazy because I made some steak in my apartment, and I was like, “Okay, I’m about to smother this in some gravy.” And he was all like, “Ok. Cool. Cool, girl, let me see what you can do!” And he about freaked out. Because I didn’t have fresh tomatoes, so I grabbed a can of stewed tomatoes. And he thought, “Why are you putting tomatoes in gravy? What are you doing?” And I was like, “What is wrong with you?” He was this very picky eater, and he became a believer. He will tell anyone, coming from the North, that “I never, ever heard of tomato gravy.” And my mother-in-law, my family who I love, they never heard of tomato gravy, either. They were from Chicago. So it was very funny to me, because then I got to cook it for all of them. And when I tell you that is their favorite thing. It’s always like, “Lyv, make that gravy!”
I smother everything in that gravy. Our twin boys are 6, and they've already been introduced to that gravy. When we want them to eat some rice, instead of putting sugar or straight salt on it, I’m gonna spoon some gravy on it. I’ll make homemade biscuits, or corn bread—buttermilk corn bread or something—and spoon tomato gravy over it. So that's home for me, that’s Loudors, that’s Cooney, that’s Mississippi.
DaiVaughn Searcy: So for me, I will start with the ingredient. The ingredient that always reminds me of home is pork, because pork is the absolute king of soul food. We wouldn’t have any soul food without pork. Some type of pork product will help us encompass any type of soul food, from cooking the bacon in the morning to saving that grease to put it in the collard greens with the smoked ham hocks. Pork is an absolute ingredient that reminds me of home.
But the meal would be pork ribs. Like I said, I lived around, and every time I came back home there was always a grill, always lit, always having that smell, that aroma. You’d see my stepdad out over there looking at the meat, smiling. Knowing he has gold on that grill. And that was our big gatherings. Our big gatherings were based off of our summer barbecues, which we had quite often growing up. We definitely had the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, where everyone got together. But we had so many summer barbecues where friends and family from the neighborhood, and from all across town, would come to get some by some of my stepdad’s famous ribs or rib tips. And, of course, there were traditional Memphis-style ribs with the dry rub—no sauce. The dry rub, over coals, cooked perfectly. Sliced in two so you could have two bones with all the meat. Yeah, I would definitely say ribs, the smell of ribs, is the food that reminds me of home.
Dé Bryant: Johari, tell us the story of a dish, like a one-pot dish, or a particular ingredient—whether it's a spice or a meat, or a vegetable of some kind—that speaks to you of home. Home by whatever definition: a physical place, a sense of belonging—home.
Johari Lweno: I’ll talk about a dish: a pilau. You know pilau rice? It is an Indian rice,
but the Swahili culture is kind of mixed with Indian, Arabic, English, Portuguese, Germany. So, from all those people who came to the coast of East Africa, we took a little bit here and there, and we formed Swahili culture. Pilau rice, mainly when I was growing up, it will be eaten on the special occasion, for example Eid Mubarak, Christmas day, a wedding day—it's a food that will be eaten on a special occasion. It's a special food. You don't eat pilau every day, unless you're very wealthy, because you have to get the best rice. There's a lot of spices that have to be mixed together. You have to put some potato; it's either meat or chicken. There's a lot that goes in it, so you need money to make pilau rice.
But to me it’s the pilau rice that was made during the Eid, or the wedding, or some sort of celebration. The whole family that are there, everyone would be chipping in to be making that pilau. It becomes a community thing, because first of all, it’s cooked on the wooden cooking place, so the guys would go look for bricks, would go look for firewood. And the girls, everybody, one of them will be peeling onions, another one peeling garlic, another one will be mixing the spices, another one will be chopping potatoes, and another one will be making sure the rice is clean, another one preparing peas, this one is cutting carrot. Until the pilau is done. You're all tired, and everybody took part in making that pilau.
That's what I miss from home, I miss from having a mother—both for my stepmother and my birth mother. That's what I miss: making things, and the whole house being part of that process of cooking that particular food. I mean on the special occasions. If it is the wedding, women from the streets, relatives will come and do the same thing to prepare for the meal that has to be eaten the next day for the wedding. Whether it's a funeral—it takes the whole community to come to make food for special occasions. So that's what I can share with you, and that's what I miss, me being here. When those times come, I feel alone.
Dé Bryant: Because your community is so connected to the food. Have you been able to reproduce that connection?
Johari Lweno: Not that much, because you know, with a working schedule it's very hard. And with that we do it outside, not in the kitchen. So, when the kitchen is small, one person will bring this and another person will bring that and everybody cooks one meal from their house and they bring it together. But they don’t really cook together, because of how the situation is. In my kitchen here, I can only be one person at a time. As a community, everybody will take part to prepare one dish and they bring it together.
Dé Bryant: So immigration changed the way you did food. And those changes were because of not only physically being somewhere different, but also schedules. And the reality of lifestyles.
Johari Lweno: Yes, and the interesting part, everybody here is talking about their grandmothers were the ones that inspired them to love cooking or love food. My grandmother, she was never like that! She said to this person, “Oh, I have guests, cook this for me or cook that for me, or come to my house and cook for me.” And when you were cooking, she would come to the kitchen and make sure that you put correct salt, but not doing the cooking herself! My grandmother was kind of an entertainer. She likes it. It's very interesting. Everybody else talking about the grandmothers’ cooking—mine was not like that.
Dé Bryant: Lisa, you went to culinary school. There's got to be expectations about what is normal, for a lack of a better way to think about it. That certain food should be cooked certain ways, and only in particular times. There has to be a body of knowledge for somebody to create a school. And so all of the stories that we have about how our individual experiences have shaped how a dish looks, that seems so different from culinary school.
Lisa Harris: Well, I wanted to fill in a bit about my family, too. So my mom, who I moved back in with, cooked just about everything. She just experimented with all kinds of things. We watched Julia Child. She cooked stuff that her family cooked, and so my palate was very blessed by everything that she did. In terms of family dishes, we would go back to Denver and see our grandparents and my grandmother—my grandmommy, my mom's mother—something that she would always make was pot roast. That's one of my main loves of food, her pot roast. I think I've been closer to making it than anybody else in my family. You know, everybody's talking about what those ingredients are. It's the love, I think, because she just put a little sliver of bell pepper in there. You have the carrot, and like there's nothing in there. It's like the stone soup almost, and that made this beautiful pot roast.
And then my grandfather, my granddaddy on my dad's side: He cooked a lot, too, so we would go to their house, and he used to fish. They both would fish a lot in the mountains, but he would always empty out the freezer of the fish that he had caught that year, and we’d have a big fish fry when we got there to visit in the summer. One of the things that he made that I remember was a ham sandwich. It was just white bread, crispy lettuce, some ham and mayonnaise, and I've never had any sandwich like that before, and there was nothing in there—but it was the love, I think, that came in there.
So I had great food growing up, and I think I started cooking about 4. I found a little card that I had handwritten, at 4—it was grilled cheese or something.
Dé Bryant: It's your very first recipe!
Lisa Harris: We traveled a lot around the country, and somehow, very young, I also learned about seasonal and local cooking. And just I remember going to Georgia and having peaches fresh from there, and it's never been like that. And Hawaii, pineapple from Hawaii is—there's nothing like that. There’s just very interesting things that come out of places that you can't get anywhere else.
So I went to culinary school in Vermont, and it was a French-based culinary school. I figured I wanted a bigger box of crayons to play with. So I went there and went through that. And it was interesting because they did talk about the French way is the way to cook. And I'm thinking, well, what about people who heat up a bunch of rocks and bake bread on it. That's not French, but it's amazing food. And people cook in the tagine, and people cook in all kinds of things. So I had a wider belief system around food than a lot of people there because they were honing in on that French way of cooking.
I feel like when I do cook something, it’s often just something very simple. Probably like Nimbi, like the peas. There’s probably not a lot in there, but it's just getting the right ingredient at the right time and doing it a special way because you love somebody.
Dé Bryant: I am so hungry in this moment! I'm feeling the tyranny of the clock. Does someone have a parting thought? A few people have a parting thought to send us away with?
Lisa Harris: In terms of sweet potatoes, I never liked sweet potatoes when I was a kid. Go figure. Love ’em now, but one of the things that always amazed me: My parents would bake a sweet potato in its jacket, and then they’d open it up and put butter in there, and kind of mush it up and eat it. At some point I learned to really love that, and I think that's just kind of the essence of a sweet potato, just roasting it, squishing it a little, cuttin’ it up, puttin’ some butter in there, and eating it like that.
Olyvia Searcy: Since we brought up sweet potatoes: I understand the miscommunication between saying candied yams, because it’s not actually a yam, which I learned later in life—they’re actually candied sweet potatoes. And just learning the culture of West Africa, right? Because that's where yams come from, and I understand they are actually grown in Florida now, but they really can't be grown in North America because of the heat. I mean, we don't have the right climate, and my uncle—actually my god-uncle, he’s Nigerian—is actually the one who schooled me on that. He was kind of rough on me. He was like, “Stop calling it a candied yam! It’s candied sweet potato.” But I always just thought that was so interesting, because to me, I always thought that showed the resiliency of Black people. We couldn't get yams when they were brought to the New World. So we got the next best thing, and that's a sweet potato, right? So now we have this history of calling it a candied yam at Thanksgiving and actually it's a sweet potato. But it’s our version of the next best thing from Mother Africa. So every time sweet potatoes come up I always think of him schooling me on that and telling me, “You have to stop that, because they are not yams. Have you ever seen a yam?” And I remember him showing me a picture of a yam and I was like “Oh my god, it looks like a foot! What?” My mind was completely blown.
And I’m so thankful to him, too, for introducing me to all types of things and really teaching me about the foodways and why we do things the way we do them. And how some foods are connectors, like Nigerian red stew, which I am obsessed with. It is my number one dish. I cannot make it. I have to have my Nigerian people make it, and it is so good. I would eat just a pot of it myself, I don't care if it’s chicken in it, it's fish in it, with the fish bones from making the stock. But he would always tell me, “Why do we stew things the way that we do?” We have so much red-orange color in our food, and he always tells me to think about that. Think about where it comes from, and why we eat the way we do. Why do you walk into a Black restaurant, and if you don't see a bottle of hot sauce you need to get up and walk out because you know that you're not in the right place, you know? That does not make sense, right? Spice always adds flavor to everything we do. It always makes it better, even if you don't like spice. It makes it a little bit better. So, you guys brought up sweet potatoes, and I just wanted to share that because he has just schooled both of us so much, but specifically the candied yam versus sweet potato debate, and why we call it candied yams. And why our ancestors did that in the first place.
Nimbilasha Cushing: I really appreciate that, Lyv, because I was talking to my family—the cooks in my family—about that, and I did not hear the explanation that you just gave. I mean we looked at pictures, and I know what the sweet potatoes look like that we grew, tubular and with a darker color. And then what you see in the supermarket. Sometimes you see those, but then more often they are just a kind of a rugged, uniform shape. So my niece, who—she's probably the sweet potato queen now—but she said, this is a yam, and this is a sweet potato. I can't wait to get her on the phone after this.
Olyvia Searcy: I would love to go to Nigeria. I've had the opportunity and it just didn't work out, and I should have went when my uncle said, “I will pay for you to go,” and I didn't go. I wish I would have, because I’m sure there’s all type of things like that. I want to go to the market, and I want to get fresh okra, and I want to see the Jollof rice, and I want somebody to hand it to me, and I want to be in the full wardrobe, and I want a basket on my head, and I want to embrace ME! I want to live that moment, and I feel like the moment I do it—you probably just feel so centered. You just feel like, welcome home. And so that's a bucket list for me to do. I'm gonna do that one day.
Dé Bryant: Johari, I see you smiling.
Johari Lweno: Yeah, I do love the Jollof rice, too. I love the pepper soup that she's talking about. But it's very interesting, because the Nigerians, they put a lot of pepper in the food. Us East Africans, we don't put a lot of pepper in the food. We use fresh pepper. We can put it in the food, but it is not like a powder the way they use it. We add it to the food, not the way they cook.
Dé Bryant: Ah, so we got that regional thing going on, too.
Olyvia Searcy: So is it less spicy when it is done that way?
Johari Lweno: Yes, when it is done that way, it is less spicy. You can get the smell of pepper but not for you to be uncomfortable.
I did make a recipe for sweet potatoes, but I wanted to share a story about the orange sweet potato.
During slavery and colonization, the Arabs were the only one eating that yellow sweet potato. It used to be called kiazi mwarabu. Kiazi kitamu means sweet potato: kiazi is potato, kitamu is sweet.
So the orange sweet potato—only Arabs could it eat, because that’s the best. Back home when I was young, when I was growing up, we used have the white sweet potato, the one yellowish, creamy, sweet potato, and the Arabs, the orange, but only you find it very rare. So whenever we peel the potatoes: “Oh, kiazi mwarabu.” And I asked my grandmother, “Why are you calling this kiazi mwarabu?” And she said, “Oh, because only Arabs could eat it.” But now people are growing them more, and everybody eats it. You cannot see people saying that, “Yes, kiazi mwarabu” unless for us, who grew up with the grandmothers. We know that kiazi mwarabu.
So the dish I prepared is the sweet potatoes with coconut milk. When we fast during Ramadan, it's used as a breakfast meal. But you can eat it in the morning, in the afternoon, any time, but it's just—during Ramadan, some foods are more popular than the others. In East Africa, we eat more cassava and sweet potatoes for breakfast. And the ingredients are sweet potatoes, sugar, cardamom powder, coconut milk and a little bit of water.
You wash and peel the sweet potatoes. You cut the potatoes and wash them again. You put them in the cooking pot, and you add coconut milk with a little bit of water, and you boil it until it’s semi-cooked. You add cardamom and some sugar for taste and little bit of salt, a pinch of salt, just to add more taste. You boil it again. Once it's cooked, you put the other coconut milk that you left aside and you boil it until it's kind of mixed together to get that creamy sweet potatoes. Once it's cooked, it's ready to be served. You can eat it with a cup of tea, with a cup of porridge, with a soda—whichever drink you like—or you can add some fish, some meat, with vegetables. I'm sure the food will be enjoyable.
The sweet potatoes that I see here are different from the ones I see back home. Here they are kind of watery. So you don't really get the same taste from the one I get back home. If you try it, it's good food, and you can enjoy it because there is cardamom and some aroma in it, and the sugar and salt kind of give it a different kind of flavor.
Dé Bryant: I so appreciate you all for bringing us amazing flavors and stories. All right, my friends. Thank you all for spending part of your evening with us. We will cross paths again, and forks and knives and plates.
Dr. Dé Bryant is a community psychologist and director of the Social Action Project and its initiative Rest for Our Weary, a community-based trauma response network. She is also on the leadership team of BLM-South Bend, the local chapter of the national movement to bring about racial justice. Because the struggle for justice is global, she has worked with partners from Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda and Ayiti (Haiti). She is on the Psychology faculty at Indiana University South Bend.
Nimbilasha Cushing, known by her friends as Nimbi, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1948. From age 3 to 14, she lived with her maternal grandparents in a small town 40 miles east of Memphis, Tennessee. They were sharecroppers and she joined them in the cotton fields at age 5. In addition to being an Air Force veteran, former flight attendant and published author, she is a member of League of Women Voters, Kiwanis and South Bend Reparations Working Group.
Johari Lweno is an immigrant from Tanzania. She has been in the United States for six years, working as a caregiver for people with mental and physical disabilities. In her free time she cooks Swahili food (samosas, chapati and sweet potatoes) for family and friends. She learned how to cook by helping her mother and stepmother in the kitchen and crafting their special recipes to share with others.
DaiVaughn (Dai) and Olyvia (Lyv) Searcy run Mad Bull BBQ, born of their mutual respect for craft barbecue. The dying art of traditional pit master fire control and whole hog barbecue fuels their passion. Mad Bull operates as a pop-up food venue and catering company throughout Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan.
Everything Mad Bull BBQ serves is made from scratch, with an intense focus on heritage and traditions. Dai’s grandparents, Willie and Tommie Pritchet, opened and operated Fifth Street Barbecue in Niles, Michigan, in 1976. The family lost Willie in 1986, but his recipes and techniques live on through Dai and his fiancée, Lyv.
Lisa Harris grew up in Michiana enjoying Mom’s home-cooked meals, including the annual New Year’s Day ham, sweet potatoes, coleslaw, black-eyed peas and cornbread for good luck. During summer trips to Denver, Colorado, her grandmommy made pot roast dinner, and her grandaddy fried fish that he caught in the Rocky Mountains. Lisa attended culinary school, where she played with food professionally. She is known as The Savory Muse and still cooks with Mom.
Lisa Barnett de Froberville is a French teacher and translator and the managing editor of Edible Michiana.
