Musical MEALS
Alexander Smalls helps home cooks explore the Gullah Geechee foods of his childhood
Alexander Smalls was a professional opera singer before he reinvented himself as a chef and restaurateur. So it’s no surprise he brings an artist’s eye to the recipes he created for his 2020 cookbook, “Meals, Music, And Muses: Recipes From My African American Kitchen.”
He brings a pretty good ear to the Southern dishes featured in the book by offering a “soundtrack” of the bold and flavorful Gullah Geechee foods he grew up eating and learned to cook in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Each chapter pays homage to a genre of music tied to a category of food. Starters, for instance, are likened to the improvisation, blues and swing found in jazz, while rice, pasta and grits — “lean on me” dishes that are often the backbone of a home cook’s repertoire — represent the comfort of spirituals.
As he notes in the cookbook’s forward, food and music are inextricably linked in the U.S., especially in African American culture. “Both Southern music and Southern food are rooted in a knotty lineage that connects West Africa and Western Europe,” he writes.
Smalls spent years traveling the world as a young artist, and won both Grammy and Tony awards for the cast recording of “Porgy and Bess,” by George Gershwin,
with the Houston Grand Opera. Yet he was never able to break opera’s glass ceiling as a Black man; his last audition with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he recalls, resulted in an offer to be part of the chorus instead of the prime role he’d made his debut to, to rave reviews.
“So I left devastated,” he says, “but really determined to get on with my life,” by opening the small, intimate restaurant he’d always dreamed of.
Cafe Beulah, one of the forerunners of the soul food revolution in New York City, opened in 1994 to rave reviews. Four more restaurants followed, including The Cecil in 2013, which highlights the interplay between African and Asian cuisines, and the
jazz bar and restaurant Minton’s next door.
“I needed to own not just a seat at the table,” Smalls says, “but the whole table.”
His first cookbook, 2018’s “Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-asian-american Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights, and Every Day,” won him a 2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award for best American cookbook. It explores the immense influence the African
diaspora has had on global cuisine.
With “Meals, Music, and Muses,” Smalls hopes to continue the conversation about the unsung contributions people of the African diaspora have made to American cuisine.
“It’s essentially my sort of ode to the African American kitchen, and my pathway if you will,” he says. “The lens to which I’ve been the creative person that I am.”