I’ve been thinking a lot about recipes.
Last night, during one of the last stops of the virtual tour for Black Futures, the book project I’ve been working on with Kimberly for the better part of the decade, our moderator Taylor Aldridge brought up the concept of recipes as a family heirlooms. Taylor, btw, is one of the brilliant minds of our time, a curator and critic. She talked about them as material inheritances, that “function as archives of sensing, and archives sustained purely by our elders and our relationships to them.” Whew.
We all talked about how hard is it to get exact recipes from our relatives — how no one will tell you exactly how much of this or that they put in their mac n’ cheese or sweet potato pie. How we receive that as amusing reticence, but recognize that it might also be influenced by trauma, as so much of our cultural IP is often stolen and commodified for profit that, as in the case of Jack Daniel, who learned to distill his whiskey from an enslaved man named Nearis Green. We talked about the episode of Queer Eye where Antoni repeatedly tries to get Mary and Deborah Jones, the sisterowners of Jones Bar-B-Q, to share their family recipe for their sauce. They refuse, and it is a glorious moment.
Our book is filled with generously shared recipes, both culinary legacies from chefs Pierre Serrao and Kia Damon, and wellness practices by breathwork teacher Siedeh St. Foxie and pleasure activist adrienne maree brown. But Taylor pointed out that our book itself is a recipe, a blueprint for navigating treacherous times, for making community and sustaining it, a way of thinking about what we want to preserve and how to do so. It’s incredible, seeing the thing you made be received with the intentions you put into it.
This newsletter is something of a promotional one. My life can be so strangely compartmentalized — my journalism career, wellness work, criticism and book projects all exist in separate channels, though I’m working on weaving them together a bit more in spaces like this — but mostly I’m just so proud of what we made, and I’m enjoying telling people about it.
The book is available now. We’re sold out on Bookshop (!) but the book is available in IRL bookstores, and places like Barnes and Noble, Powells’ and all the usual suspects. If you get it, and have a response to this notion of recipes embedded within it, tell me about it? Talking about this project has been a luminous bright spot in this otherwise dismalass end to the year.