Jessica Harris on Black Foodways and Her New Cookbook, ‘Braided Heritage’

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

Spotify

On this episode

Dr. Jessica B. Harris is a scholar of the African food diaspora, an award-winning and prolific writer, a gifted storyteller and speaker, a teacher, and an icon to many. But what gets lost sometimes is that she's a person, first and foremost — one whose bookishness as a kid made it hard for her to connect with other kids. One raised by two artists whose dreams had to be deferred to make a living in New York but who supported their daughter's aspirations to be onstage. One whose curiosity and itchy traveling feet led her to explore the world and examine how the threads of many cultures wove together to end up on our dinner plate. She joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about growing up as an outsider, the classic New York restaurants that kindled her lifelong love of France, her new book Braided Heritage, the loneliness of being a pioneer, and what it's like to live inside a mountain of cookbooks.

Meet our guest

Dr. Jessica B. Harris is a historian, author, and speaker renowned for her groundbreaking work exploring the culinary traditions of the African diaspora and the roots of American foodways. She has authored, edited, or translated 17 books including High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, which was adapted into a Netflix docuseries, as well as her most recent, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine. In 2020, she was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and received the James Beard Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. She is a professor emerita at Queens College, CUNY, and has contributed and guest-edited stories and recipes in Food & Wine for over 30 years.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine's Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing.

She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On her lifelong love of books

“As an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself in my books. I was the kid who got ordered, ‘Stop reading, go outside and play with the kids!' And it was like, ‘Do I have to?' Post-COVID, I realized I don't read during the day; the daytime is for work. I read at night, I read in the bathtub, I read before I go to bed. If I read during the day, it's research.

I've got a major book problem. The solution is a lot of space and it's jam-ram-packed with books. Bookcases everywhere. A gentleman caller — I'm being very Tennessee Williams about that — once referred to the piles of books around my bed as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I think there's probably about 27 pillars of wisdom now.”

On her parents' delayed dreams

“My parents were extraordinarily aspirational. They wanted me to have a better shot than they did — a possibility of doing different and better. I've realized that they were artists who never got to be artists. My mother at 65 became a master jeweler. My father could sketch; he had the eye and the hand. But of course these were middle class, working class, lower-working-class Black folks who were clawing their way up the ladder. There wasn't time for art. It was classic, ‘You'll never make money if you're an actress.' But interestingly enough before she died, my mother said, ‘I always wonder what would've happened if you had been an actress.'”

On her first taste of Western Africa

“As I started working on my dissertation in my early 20s, I became Essence‘s travel editor. The world was very different then and there were not a lot of Black writers in the food and travel space. I majored in French in college. I had traveled with my parents, mainly to Europe — the mother country back then — but when it came time for my doctoral dissertation, I made my first trip to Western Africa. It was in 1972 — or as I like to tell the world, “BR” or “Before Roots.” African Americans were not going to the continent the same way before Roots, which came out in 1977. It transformed how many of us thought about the continent.

There was a tour group called International Weekends that did back-to-back charters where a plane takes one load of people over, then takes the other group of people back. There were one-week trips from New York to Dakar for $500 or $600. People went in droves and it changed how people thought. My doctorate is in performance studies and my dissertation was on the French-speaking theater of Senegal.

I started going to Senegal and Western Africa. On my first trip, my mother went with me. She was the one with the palate, so I was watching and tasting this food for myself, with the soundtrack of my mother. I speak fluent French, so I went to a lot of the French-speaking countries — Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Benin — the area from which a lot of the enslaved were kidnapped. The foods began resonating. At the same time, as travel editor at Essence, I was going to the Caribbean and Brazil and then that got put into the cauldron. That's the genesis and the impetus for what happened in my career.”

On being a pioneer

“I like to remind people I was doing Bourdain before Bourdain existed. I was talking about food and culture and history together in '77 or '78 back then. I just like to remind people that a Black lady did that.”

On (mostly not) accepting herself as an authority and an icon

“I have no idea of that to this day. That's not how I feel. That's not my world. That's not my head space. I don't know that about me. I kind of often look around and wonder who she is. You know, ‘Gee, I'd like to meet her.' I think some it is a conscious refusal to lean into it, because I think that there be dragons. If you lean into your persona, you can become something other than what you might otherwise be. It's distancing if people are sort of, ‘Oh, that's so-and-so.' Then they don't come up to you, shake your hand, and give you a hug. Or they do, but then they want a selfie.

You have to put all of that in perspective as you try to negotiate this veil of tears that's life. It makes it harder to know where you are and who you are, and to distinguish between friends, deep friends, and acquaintances. It becomes even more complex if people are seeing that and not you.”

On the meaning of Braided Heritage

“A braid is three parts coming together to form one thing. Braided Heritage is a step away from the world that people know me in, where it is just African American. The conceit is that the foundational food and the foundation of the country in which I grew up is a braid of Native American, European American — specifically the Spanish, the British, the Dutch, the French (who were all in it pretty much before anybody else) — and African Americans. Surprise, surprise — I know somebody from all of these strands, and the book is me speaking with my friends.”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowitz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Kristen Kish, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, Antoni Porowski, Run the Jewels, Chris Shepherd, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what's on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that'll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.