African-American Heritage: A Higher <i> Cala</i>

It’s early on a Friday afternoon, and I’m driving down Rossmore to the Kukatonor restaurant with food historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Kukatonor, I tell her, serves Liberian food.

Harris has studied foods of the African diaspora for years. Her first cookbook, “Hot Stuff,” an homage to the “piquant” foods of the diaspora, was published a decade ago. Her second book tackled Africa’s culinary influence in the New World. Then came a book on Caribbean cooking and one on Brazilian cooking.

Her new cookbook, “The Welcome Table: African-American Heritage Cooking” (Simon & Schuster: 1995), is at once scholarly, practical and fun to read.

In an exuberant introduction, Harris traces African American cuisine from the hearths of Africa to the New World, where it was expanded and adapted by a people who yearned to “live higher on the hog,” yet made resourceful, spirited use of whatever ingredients they could get.

Their love of hot spices, fresh vegetables, smoked meats and fried foods was contagious, and soon these elements found their way into the plantations’ Big Houses.

During Westward expansion the cooking migrated into new territories in the stewpots of African American camp cooks, and a subtle “Africanization of the railway menus” took place in dining cars nationwide.

“With the improvisational genius that gave the world jazz,” writes Harris, “we have cooked our way into the hearts, minds and stomachs of a country.”

“The Welcome Table” is chock full of anecdotes, reflection and evocative photographs. We see Harris herself, at age 1, reaching for the refrigerator door. Seven turn-of-the-century African American cooks stand in a row, each stuffing a turkey. A young woman in long skirts smiles winsomely before a bumper crop of peanuts in 1870.

Clearly, Harris is a historian who knows her subject.

*

“Liberian food?”

Harris looks puzzled as I describe the restaurant we are about to enter.

Although she has traveled and eaten and cooked extensively in Western Africa, and is familiar with Liberia’s violent history, Harris cheerfully admits that she knows little or nothing in particular about Liberian cuisine. Given that Liberia was originally an experiment to repatriate former slaves to their ancestral Africa, Harris wonders--somewhat mischievously--whether at Kukatonor we’ll find American-style “soul food” transposed back to Africa.

Still, she is curious and game . . . well, almost game. “I try not to be too adventurous in my eating while I’m on a book tour,” she says. “I’ve become the master of grilled chicken salads in hotel restaurants.” Somehow, it’s heartening to know that, despite her adventurousness in eating worldwide, she too can suffer distress from the unfamiliar.

A slim, energetic woman, Harris wears stylish, color-flecked horn rims, a turquoise shirt and a scarf in the bright yellows and blues of a tropical bird. When she’s not traveling and researching a new book or magazine article, she teaches English and French literature at Queens College and lives in her hometown: Brooklyn.

In addition to “The Welcome Table,” 1995 will see the publication of two more books by Harris: “A Kwanzaa Keepsake” (Simon & Schuster), a celebration of the African-American holiday, and “The World Beauty Book” (HarperCollins San Francisco), a guide to home beauty treatments for women of color, a book she laughingly describes as “another kind of cookbook.”

Several times, in amazement, I blurt out the same question: “How can you do so much?” And each time, Harris replies with the same well-rehearsed, not quite satisfactory expression: “I’m spread so thin you can see right through me.”

As it happens, the cheerful, colorful Kukatonor specializes in an inclusive West African cuisine. (Americo-Liberians, the descendants of African American settlers, comprise only about 5% of the country’s population; the other 95% are tribal peoples.) Harris is delighted to discover that the menu lists her favorite chicken dish, yassa from Senegal. In fact, Kukatonor’s menu lists examples of almost all the culinary characteristics or “tendencies” in African cooking, which are spelled out in Harris’ introduction to “The Welcome Table.” Originally compiled by food anthropologist William Bascom, the list of these “tendencies” includes composed rice dishes, fritters, smoked ingredients used for flavoring, okra used as a thickener, leafy green vegetables, peppery and spicy sauces, and nuts and seeds used as thickeners.

*

Unfortunately, today the Kukatonor kitchen is out of chicken yassa . Harris is not enthused at the idea of a Nigerian dish, egusi , a stew thickened with melon seed. She’s not much more enthused at the idea of fufu either, especially with okra sauce, but we do order it. Harris confesses that, along with countless other Americans, she’s never been fond of the notoriously slimy green vegetable, but it is a quintessentially African food. (The seeds of this erratically popular vegetable, Harris writes in “The Welcome Table,” came to the New World via slave ships; the book also says that a Bantu word for okra, quingombo , is the root of our word gumbo , the okra-thickened stews of the American South.)

Fufu is a sticky, snow-white starch made of cassava that’s served in a pristine mound on a plate next to a bowl of sauce or stew. Harris demonstrates how to eat it: With moistened fingers of the right hand, you pinch off a glob and drag it through the accompanying stew or sauce. The stew in question demonstrates the use of okra as a thickener. In fact, it is so thick and mucilaginous it’s hard to break the surface tension and actually get any sauce on the fufu. “That’s okra,” says Harris. “The more you chop it and the longer you cook it, the slimier it gets.” The okra in this otherwise tasty concoction has indeed been chopped into the tiniest green flecks imaginable. The other problem we have with the stew are the large flappy pieces of chicken meat. Do you just pick them up along with the fufu ?

Harris shrugs. “I’m used to stews being in smaller pieces,” she says.

We try the jollof rice, a dish “composed” with tomatoes, beans and vegetables and served with stewed oxtails on the side. Harris orders a Liberian-style stew with fresh cabbage and a large bottle of Nigerian Star beer.

We are happily trying to capture the elusive okra sauce on sticky clumps of fufu and chatting about black-eyed peas and how hard it is to remember if they’re truly a pea or a bean, when she starts chuckling. “How can I do all the things I do? I have no social life!”

I say, “I find that hard to believe.”

“Really. My social life is wherever I hang my hat, wherever I am. Like right now, with you. My friends are the people I’m with, wherever I am.”

*

Indeed, a few minutes after this confession, our luncheon party is increased by one: Harris has invited a solo diner at a nearby table to join us. He is, it turns out, the editor of a local alternative magazine. He has dished up his own lunch from the steam-table buffet, and in no time we’re sampling the items on his plate.

“Now, what’s this?” Harris holds up a small brown fritter.

Our new lunch companion doesn’t know, but the waiter tells us: “It’s cala. “

“ Cala ?” Harris’ eyes suddenly light up. “ Cala ? Made with rice?”

The waiter nods.

Harris’ excitement is obvious. “I have a recipe for cala in ‘The Welcome Table,’ ” she exclaims. “They’re a rice fritter from New Orleans, like a beignet ! I’ve never had a Liberian version!”

The next thing I know, Harris has summoned Anna Nagbe, the cook, from the kitchen, and the two women go off to another table and put their heads together on rice fritters. Harris gives Nagbe a copy of “The Welcome Table.” Nagbe gives Harris her recipe for cala.

Lunch is over. Harris distributes hugs all around.

*

Throughout “The Welcome Table,” Harris discusses the specific ways African-American cooking evolved from the African techniques and tendencies we encountered at Kukatonor. In America, composed rice dishes include hoppin’ John and dirty rice; fritters include hush puppies and beignets; leafy greens include collards and mustard slow-cooked with a bit of smoked meat for flavor. And bottled pepper sauces of all kinds have become a kind of national addiction.

African-American cooking was dubbed “soul food” in the ‘60s, but Harris prefers to call it “survival food”--”the food that took African-Americans from slavery to the present.” And while she by no means suggests that the tradition has ended, in her introduction and in her selected interviews with other African-Americans Harris repeatedly suggests that authentic African-American heritage cooking is becoming more a cuisine of celebration and less appropriate for a daily diet.

Recipes are beautifully annotated, straightforward, easy to follow and presented in their “most authentic form possible.”

Harris intends them, she writes, as “memory aids to be embroidered on in your own manner and fine-tuned to your own individual taste.” Lest you think this a weighty historical tome, consider Harris’ recipe for watermelon--given only after she tells us that pictures of watermelon were found in Egyptian tomb drawings:

1 large slice watermelon .

Privacy.

Chill the watermelon. Sit down on the porch, bite into the fruit and spit the seeds out as far as you can.

Throughout the book, Harris makes it clear that the fat, salt and sugar content of many dishes is not acceptable by today’s health-conscious standards. “Our traditional diet, although glorious and delicious, was evolved by a group of people who were up at dawn to plow the back 40 before having breakfast.” Harris insists, however, that the traditional emphasis on fresh, seasonal produce and lively flavors can and does serve as a springboard for a new, lighter, no less flavorful African-American approach to food.

With all its scholarship and lore and charming photographs, “The Welcome Table” makes one thing abundantly clear: In the history of the food lies the history of a people. For example, take the simple-to-make pralines, below. In her recipe notes, Harris writes how women slaves made these sugared confections and sold them door-to-door. “. . . the money earned from these sales frequently went to the mistress of the house, although on some occasions, a portion was given to the woman who might in this manner one day be able to pay for her freedom. . . .”

You’ll see: A praline will never be just a praline again.

The following recipes and notes are excerpted from “The Welcome Table.”

*

“The cala, or deep-fried rice fritter, was for many years a traditional New Orleans delicacy. The African-American cala woman was a daily sight in the New Orleans streets until the early 1900s. The rice fritter was a traditional accompaniment to the daily coffee, even though it has been supplanted today by the beignet. Calas, though, seem to have been the exclusive culinary preserve of African-American cooks, who peddled them in the French Market and door to door, carrying their covered bowls of calas on their heads. Their cry, “Belles calas! Tout chaud!” (“Beautiful rice fritters! Nice and hot!”) is all that remains today of the cala.

“There are two basic recipes for cala: One calls for baking powder and whole rice; the other calls for yeast and mashed rice. It would seem that the latter is the more authentic. Indeed, the Vai people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, West African rice-growing regions whose people were represented in the Southern slave census, make rice fritters; their word for uncooked rice is kala. For the Bambara people, the word means the straw or stalk of a cereal, and in the Gullah dialect of Georgia and South Carolina, kala means rice. Note that the dough must rise overnight.”

CALAS

2 1/4 cups cold water

3/4 cup long-grain rice

1 1/2 packages dry yeast

1/2 cup lukewarm water

4 eggs, well beaten

3/8 cup granulated sugar

3/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups flour

Oil

Powdered sugar

*

Place water and rice in saucepan. Bring to boil. Lower heat. Cook rice 25 to 30 minutes or until tender. Drain rice. Place in mixing bowl. Mash rice with back of spoon. Set aside to cool.

In separate bowl, dissolve yeast in lukewarm water. Add to cooled rice. Beat mixture 2 minutes. Cover bowl with slightly moistened kitchen towel. Let stand in warm place to rise overnight.

When ready to prepare, add eggs, granulated sugar, nutmeg, salt and flour to rice mixture. Beat thoroughly, cover, and set to rise 30 minutes.

Heat 3 inches of oil for frying in heavy pan to 375 degrees. Drop batter by tablespoonfuls into hot oil, frying few fritters at time until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Dust with powdered sugar to taste. Serve hot. Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

336 calories; 340 mg sodium; 142 mg cholesterol; 5 grams fat; 61 grams carbohydrates; 10 grams protein; 0.18 gram fiber.

*

“This New Orleans confection is another important link in the chain of African-American cooking. Throughout the African diaspora in the New World, women have worked at preparing sugared confections and selling them door to door in public areas of the city. During the period of enslavement, the money earned from these sales frequently went to the mistress of the house, although on some occasions a portion was given to the woman, who might in this manner one day be able to pay for her freedom. After Emancipation, the selling of sweets became a time-honored way of earning a small but honorable living. The legacy of the slave saleswomen still lives on in Brazil’s baianas de tabuleiro, in the sweets sellers of the Caribbean, and in the pralinieres of New Orleans, although there are only a perilous few of them left.

“The term praline is not an African one, although the similarities of the New Orleans praline to candies from Curacao, Brazil, Jamaica, Guadeloup e and other places where Africans have cooked in the New World would startle many a shop owner in the French Quarter. The name harks back to France and to the Duc du Praslin, who is said to have had a particular fondness for the sugar-coated almonds that bear his name. A while back, I was speaking with Leah Chase, the doyenne of African-American Creole cooking of New Orleans, and was startled to hear her recall that the original praline was not the brown-sugar pecan confection that is so familiar today, but rather a pink or white coconut patty that is much closer in taste and in form to its Caribbean and Brazilian cousins. Here are the white and pink coconut versions of this achingly sweet treat.”

PRALINES

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup evaporated milk

1 teaspoon butter

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup freshly grated coconut

*

Mix sugar and milk together in heavy saucepan. Cook over medium heat until mixture reaches 236 degrees on candy thermometer.

Remove mixture from heat. Add butter and vanilla. Beat mixture until creamy with slight shine, but still thin. Add coconut. Stir well to evenly distribute coconut. Drop pralines by spoonfuls onto sheet of greased foil or marble slab. Let stand to harden. When hardened, pralines can be stored in tins. Makes about 12 pralines.

Each serving contains about:

137 calories; 16 mg sodium; 4 mg cholesterol; 3 grams fat; 27 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram protein; 0.28 gram fiber.

*

Variations:

Pink Pralines

Add few drops of red food coloring when coconut is worked into mixture.

*

Benne Pralines

Although less well known than coconut or pecan counterparts, benne pralines are also part of the confectioner’s heritage of the African-American South. In this case, 1/2 cup of sesame seeds are toasted in heavy skillet until golden brown. Then add to basic praline mixture instead of coconut.

*

“Chicken Yassa, a dish from the southern part of Senegal in West Africa, is one of the first West African dishes that I ever tasted and one that I use to introduce African cooking to friends. It’s become a sort of good-luck recipe for me, and I serve it at New Year’s or at least once during the holiday season in tribute to the cooks who went before me. What’s it doing in an African-American cookbook? It’s here for two reasons. First, it’s to remind us about the origins of African-American tastes, and secondly, it’s to speak of the new African immigrants who daily are expanding our ideas of what African-American food is.”

CHICKEN YASSA

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

3 large onions, sliced

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

1/8 teaspoon minced habanero chile

5 tablespoons peanut oil

1 (2 1/2- to 3 1/2-pound) chicken, cut into serving pieces

1 habanero chile, pierced with fork

1/2 cup water

*

Place lemon juice, onions, salt, pepper to taste, minced chile and 1/4 cup peanut oil in large nonreactive bowl. Stir to blend. Place chicken pieces in marinade, making sure they are all well covered. Marinate at least 2 hours in refrigerator.

Remove chicken pieces, reserving marinade. Place pieces in shallow roasting pan. Broil until lightly browned on both sides.

Remove onions from marinade. Cook onions in remaining 1 tablespoon peanut oil in heat-proof 3-quart casserole or Dutch oven until tender and translucent. Add remaining marinade.

When liquid is heated, add chicken pieces, whole chile and water. Stir to mix well. Boil slowly. Lower heat and simmer about 20 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through. Serve hot over white rice. Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

337 calories; 119 mg sodium; 72 mg cholesterol; 26 grams fat; 7 grams carbohydrates; 19 grams protein; 0.61 gram fiber.

* Glazed French earthenware coffee cup and saucer on H12, from Cassis & Co., available at Cinzia, Santa Monica.

* Food styling by Donna Deane and Mayi Brady