Jessica B. Harris needs no introduction. As a pioneering culinary historian (and longtime G&G contributor), Harris has penned an expansive canon of work over her forty-year career. Braided Heritage, the most recent addition to her oeuvre, is a treasure trove of story-forward recipes, three of which she shared here: brown sugar pound cake, pickled peaches, and summer succotash.
The book weaves together tales and traditions from three cultures that are foundational to American cuisine: African, European, and Native American. Below, we chatted with Harris about why three is a magic number, the flexibility of tradition, and how she’s spending her summer post–book tour.
A strong historical narrative threads through Braided Heritage. What was the research process like?
First of all, I was a culinary historian before it had a name. It’s not an avocation. I’m an academic, and you know, your profession forms your brain if you do it long enough—you start thinking in certain ways because of what you do. The very first book I wrote, Hot Stuff, was a book about food with peppers and chilies from around the world, and rather than just go straight to the recipe, I started reading Columbus’s diaries and Marco Polo’s diaries. So it’s always been the research that fascinates me as much, or maybe even more, than the recipes. The recipe simply becomes a locus for research.
I’ve been writing about food since 1985, so little crumbs and snatches along the way have just become part of my general database. There are some things I’ve learned but have never really been able to use that fit perfectly in here. So it’s very cumulative. It allowed me to take a more in-depth look at the history of the place that I am from.
You begin your introduction by stating that “three is a magic number.” Where did that concept originate, and why is it such an important theme in the book?
At some point I gave a lecture called “Three Is A Magic Number,” and when I got off the podium, somebody said, “I think that’s a book.” That is the genesis.
I think the old motto of the United States is E pluribus unum—out of many, one. It’s certainly the case when we talk about American food. Take a classic American summer menu, for example. Maybe you’ve got fried chicken—well, the chicken is Old World. You may have a corn pudding of some sort, or corn on the cob—the corn is New World. Maybe you finish it off with a slice of watermelon—that’s from Africa, Old World. So even the things we think of as the most basically “American” are nuanced, and that power of three really shows up on the table.
You write about how so-called “traditional” recipes are often the most flexible and subject to change because of how they’re passed down. Can you recall an example of this in your home kitchen?
I can recall some of the absence of that! My mother was absolutely brilliant in the kitchen and had trained as a dietitian. She was one of those left-brained people who could bake from scratch without a recipe. Because of that, things didn’t get passed on through the kitchen. Other things did—I make a fair version of her fried chicken. It’s hers, but also a little bit mine.
Tradition is always a state of flux. There is no absolute, no “it must be this way.” That’s one of the things that’s so fascinating about cooking—it varies. And it can vary in the hands of the same chef because they cook with different ingredients. I’m on Martha’s Vineyard cooking with the ingredients I can find here, but if I was cooking with the same ingredients as I would find them in New Orleans, it may give me two entirely different dishes. Maybe not radically different, but they would be nuanced, each a way of their place.
The profiles peppered throughout this book—of chefs, authors, and tastemakers—really add to that depth of tradition.
This book is certainly a collaborative work. I mean, my name is on it, but all of those folks are people I know personally, many of them dear friends for more than thirty or forty years. The fact that they were so generous with their time and their recipes gave kind of a quirky fun to things, because you hear different voices and you see different threads in the kitchen.
Where are you doing most of your cooking and writing these days?
From May until October, I kind of roost on Martha’s Vineyard. The first part of this summer is going to be given over to the care, feeding, and promotion of this book, and after that…the rest of the summer is going to be called “Jessica rests.” [Laughs.] Sitting—I have a chair that I call Command Central, where I write sometimes—surrounded by books, reading, watching the venerable oak tree in front of the house, is quite relaxing.
I actually haven’t been up here long enough to really hunker down and do any cooking but when I get back at the end of June, I will do my plant rounds and all of that stuff. There are plenty of farmers’ markets here, and I’m a regular, so they know I’m showing up. It’s one of my happy places on the island.
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