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Alexander Smalls is an unusual editor for a cookbook. He was an opera singer and performed in the production of Porgy and Bess that won both a Grammy and a Tony, before becoming a chef, running The Cecil in Harlem and winning a James Beard Award.
Here he has brought together 120 recipes from 33 chefs, restaurateurs and writers who are shaping the African food landscape right now. The book is organised geographically into five regions and is concerned throughout with home cooking, not restaurant kitchens.
That is an important distinction. In Western publishing, African food has been presented almost exclusively either as anthropology, something to be studied, or as fine dining, something an individual chef has lifted out of its context. Here it is neither. It is everyday food, documented by the people who cook it.
That a book like this has been missing for so long says more about the publishing industry than it does about African food.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 288
Language: English
First published: 2024
