Iron Pots & Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking Book

The book openings with

"There is a crescent, a sinuous imaginary line that begins on Mauritania's coast and sweeps downward along Africa palm fringed beaches from the buff colored sand dunes of Senegal and Mauritania, through the lagoons of the Ivory Coast and beyond, to Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, then down to the forested regions of countries with names like drumbeats: Congo, Gabon, Angola. This same line continues to sweep across the Atlantic, carrying with it music, gesture, speech, dance, joie de vivre, and yes, food. On the other side of the Atlantic it washes ashore on equally palm-fringed beaches…."- Jessica Harris, Iron and Wooden Spoons


And thus, begins this triumphant nutritious, cultural, and spiritual journey of words, not just about the cuisine of the African Diaspora, but an insightful sampling of endless tales and ancient histories across the globe, including migratory patterns that, five hundred years before Columbus, locate Africans in the Americas and Asia, where chili peppers ubiquitous in African pots, coconut trees, sweet potatoes, and maize, were brought back to African shores and spread throughout the continent.

The migration continues with Africans being inhumanly captured on their soil, where the substandard diets fed to them in the hauls of slave ships on those fateful Middle Passage journeys, upon arrival, combined with the food traditions they carried to the New World that revolutionized American culture.

Countless lives of colonists, who suffered diseases from vitamin deficiencies, were prolonged by the introduction of numerous vitamin-enriched African vegetables. The hybridization of so many African dishes also transformed often bland European sustenance (prone to spoilage) into everyday gourmet meals that, with African spices, injected endless kaleidoscopes of flavor and, additionally, greatly extended the life of dishes.

Harris's amazing achievement further traces these transatlantic journeys to the Caribbean and Latin America where Garifuna Culture was forged, introducing "cassava and pigeon pies for breakfast, conch soup for lunch, and barbecued jerk hog and black crab pepper pot for dinner" in the most remote Indigenous and Maroon villages to the massive sugar plantations and regular homes throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

One of the most profound aspects of this book is what separates Afro-cuisine from all others: its deep rootedness in spiritual practices, making it truly "Fit for The [Goddesses] Gods". Big house cooks on plantations from New Orleans to Martinique, to Haiti, and down to Brazil's Bahia countryside, generally had special privileges, including what was one of the most valuable - the independence to leave the plantation, where they often opened small culinary
"lean-tos" in the rural surrounding towns. What their enslavers did not know was that many of these cooks were also Gro Mambos who bartered meals to their people, which not only greatly supplemented the often meager plantation rations, but was also very important comfort food. These lean-tos soon became culinary and cultural "ring shouts" that kept the people spiritually and culturally connected so they could sustain and thrive during one of the darkest epochs in world history.

Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons reminds us that through food, where ever we stand, from the numerous American Barrios, to New York's five Boroughs, the Midwest urban hubs and prairies, to Louisiana's parishes, and to the rest of the Delta plains, that we are all connected at the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table.

This book belongs in every kitchen library, because every kitchen should have its own separate library