Kitchen Improvisations: 19th Century Cookbooks, Grandmother’s Harlem Kitchen, and the Legacy of Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor

On March 14th, 2024 we welcomed Prof. Rafia Zafar to the Culinaria Kitchen Lab for a session that weaves together histories, recipes, and delectable improvisation. Working with and between the stories and dishes crafted by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor and Zafar’s Grandmother in her Harlem restaurant kitchen, Prof. Zafar explored the languages of food, resilience, and memory composed in the literary genre of Black and African American food writing and cookbooks. Guests were invited to sample the dishes demonstrated by Prof. Zafar as a part of this kitchen session.

 

This event was followed by a seminar With Prof. Zafar on Friday, March 15th, titled "Kitchenette Unbuilding: Two Black women writers on ‘the heart of the home’" at Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7.

 

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds degrees from the City College of New York (BA, English), Columbia University (MA, English & Comparative Literature) and Harvard University (PhD, History of American Civilization). In April 2024 she will return to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, where she will lecture in its master’s program in Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility. At her home institution she teaches popular courses on Food & Literature and Black Foodways.

 

Zafar’s major publications include Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning; the two-volume Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870; Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor); and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor). In addition to her book publications, she co-edited a special issue of African American Review on the bibliophile and historian Arturo Schomburg. Her awards and fellowships include the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University, a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship, election to the American Antiquarian Society and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library). She began her career in foodways during university, slinging cheese at a little gourmet store in New York City that morphed into Dean & DeLuca, now gone, but at its height a veritable temple for professional chefs, gourmets, and food tourists alike.

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Pubic Policy and the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough.