Preserving a legacy
With a wink and a ‘yasssss,’ Lazarus Lynch brings soul food to the Snapchat generation
When Lazarus Lynch’s debut cookbook came out last month, he slipped into an electric-blue and purple wig, a checkered trenchcoat and leather pants, and took to the streets. Followed by a five-piece band, Lynch skipped up the subway steps and shimmied to the center of Times Square, where he began dancing with his book held high in one hand, a tambourine keeping beat in the other. Soon there was a crowd surrounding Lynch, and he was in his element.
Lynch is as comfortable singing, playing music and dancing through Times Square as he is in the kitchen. He recently put out the R&B single “In My World,” which has been streamed nearly 150,000 times on Spotify. And when he’s not making music or developing recipes, Lynch is interviewing cooks and farmers for “Comfort Nation,” his Food Network digital series focused on cooking traditions around the country.
“In the book I wanted to marry all those things,” Lynch tells me the following week in the brickwalled kitchen of the Queens apartment in New York where he was raised and where his mother still lives. “I was thinking, ‘How do you do that?’ I had no template. I had no model for how books articulate heart and soul.”
So the 25-year-old created exactly the book he couldn’t find a template for, one exploding with color and personality, and named it “Son of a Southern Chef: Cook With Soul.”
Though “Son of a Southern Chef ” overflows with expressions of self-love, Lynch hasn’t always been so comfortable in his own skin. Growing up, he followed his parents — devout Christians — to church every Sunday, and as close as he was with them, he didn’t know how they would receive his queerness. “I grew up with this idea and this teaching that maybe who I am is wrong,” Lynch says. In 2014, reclining on a sun-dappled park bench with his father, he was struck by a sense that this was finally the right time to broach the topic. “I remember being on that bench, and my dad saying, ‘I’m going to love you no matter what.’ It meant everything to me. There are a lot of children that don’t have that support.”
That conversation stuck with Lynch and informed his work. “I wasn’t sitting here thinking, ‘How can I make this book queer?’ ” he says. “It’s just me. But when young queer boys and girls come up to me and they say, ‘Thank you for being yourself, you’ve inspired me to be myself, you’ve inspired me to talk to my parents,’ that’s part of the joy I get to experience every day.”
The book’s recipe headnotes are conversational, like a friend texting you words of encouragement. His shrimp and grits “screams yasssss,” he writes, and in the Issa Drinks Wave section of the book — what other cookbook indexes might simply refer to as beverages — a watermelon cocktail’s headnote reads, “I could see Jay-Z and Beyoncé sipping on these on Maui.”
Therese Nelson, a food historian and founder of the website Black Culinary History, applauds Lynch’s attempt to bridge generations. “The power in someone like Lazarus is the ability to show people that these black foodways have modern viability,” she says. “He’s somebody who you’re going to relate to culturally. To take these recipes and make them cool and interesting and modern is powerful.”
The book sometimes reads like an autobiography, with nearly every recipe connecting back to his family. When Lynch was growing up in the same kitchen where he stands dredging thick fillets of fish now, his father, Johnny Ray Lynch, was always working. “He took on any job he could,” Lynch says. “He created several businesses. Everything from a carpet store, a 99-cent store, a men’s fashion store, a moving service and then finally the restaurant.”
The restaurant was Baby Sister’s Soul Food, a small space in Queens. There, he and Lynch’s Guyanese-born mother, Debbie-Ann Gravesande Lynch, served the dishes Lynch’s father ate as a child in Bessemer, Alabama. Baby Sister’s Soul
Food was a community space and a family affair.
After high school Lynch enrolled at Buffalo State College. Unenthusiastic about his classes, he launched a blog and a YouTube channel, both titled “Son of a Southern Chef,” which is how he’d come to see his place in the world of food. He began interviewing his father and watching him more closely as he cooked, writing down everything he did. He shared those recipes and stories online, and people wanted more. Lynch’s Instagram following was expanding quickly, and a TV network reached out to cast him for a Snapchat cooking series. A few months later, ABC Network approached Lynch to host a digital cooking show, “Tastemade Get Cookin’.”
Then, Lynch received a call that his father, who had been battling cancer for more than a year, had died at 53. Lynch was devastated. What would happen to his father’s stories and recipes, many of which Lynch had recorded for his blog, now that he was no longer at the restaurant? Suddenly, Son of a Southern Chef took on a new meaning. “More than ever, legacy was so important to me,” Lynch says. So he decided to write this book.
Nicole Taylor, a food writer and author of “The Up South Cookbook,” says Lynch’s work to preserve his father’s legacy is crucial. “For decades and decades, there were these brilliant, amazing black people from the South and beyond who were doing creative things, but they weren’t recorded.”
While Lynch’s own recipes are boundarypushing, he didn’t meddle too much with his family’s dishes. “My father loved butter, he loved all that stuff,” Lynch says. “In the book, I celebrate that. I don’t dismiss it.” Dad’s Fried Fish Sandwiches, for instance, the ones Lynch is making as we talk, call for Aunt Jemima self-rising flour. “This was the classic dish at Dad’s store. In the black community, fried fish is a celebration food.”