As 2024 was running out and a new year loomed, the prolific cookbook author and culinary historian Jessica B. Harris was thinking about Oxford’s word of the year: brain rot.
“We’re all suffering from varying degrees and intensities of brain rot,” said Dr. Harris, who had just taken a short, intentional break from her own digital overconsumption with a cozy mystery novel and a couple of episodes of “The Crown” before zipping from her home in New Orleans to New York for the holidays. It wasn’t a full reset, but it was a start.
“People are feeling all sorts of pressures right now — racially, culturally, economically,” she said. “Kwanzaa is a time to come together, a time for people to renew and regroup and revivify.”
Recipe: Holiday Gingerbread Cake With Molasses Whipped Cream
The 2021 Netflix series “High on the Hog,” based on a book by Dr. Harris of the same name, introduced many Americans to her work, but Dr. Harris has been illuminating the complexity of Black foodways for decades.
She first published her book “A Kwanzaa Keepsake and Cookbook” in 1995, when she said she felt a need to connect meaningfully beyond her immediate family. Though she hadn’t grown up celebrating Kwanzaa, she read the work of Maulana Karenga, who designed and codified the Black holiday in the 1960s, then filtered it through her own experience of family and ritual.
The resulting work was part historical explainer and guidebook, part cookbook and part family keepsake with pages to be filled in by whoever picked it up, encouraging improvisation and adaptation. It was an idiosyncratic guide to the holiday, which this year begins on Dec. 26, written in her warm, witty voice, and pulling in Black figures throughout history to celebrate.
In the book, Dr. Harris describes the menu at one of her multigenerational, gloriously chaotic Kwanzaa celebrations in New York, before her mother died in 2000. For friends from all over the United States and the African diaspora, she made hoppin’ John and collard greens, a mix of okra, corn and tomatoes with chiles, as well as roast pork “for sheer colored cussedness, survival, and a universal desire to live high on the hog.” This November, Dr. Harris published a new edition of “A Kwanzaa Keepsake” with updated recipes and writing, adding short profiles of queer Black figures to each chapter — Simon Nkoli, Gladys Alberta Bentley, Brian Williamson.
“I’m seeing a need for coming together and healing now that is as pressing, maybe even more pressing, than in 1995,” she said.
The book remains organized around the seven principles of Kwanzaa, which Dr. Harris interprets with seven themed menus. The third night, which celebrates Ujima (collective work and responsibility) is full of portable dishes, designed to be packed up for a potluck or communal supper — a spicy macaroni and cheese, broiled chicken thighs that taste as good at room temperature as they do straight out of the oven, and a deep-dish apple cobbler.
Her hot-water gingerbread spiked with ginger and cinnamon — the same one she made for Dr. Betty Shabazz while promoting this book in the 1990s — is simple, straightforward and rich with the smoky flavor of molasses. For Dr. Harris, it’s dessert on the fifth night of Kwanzaa, celebrating Nia (purpose), served with molasses whipped cream.
On the sixth night, celebrating Kuumba (creativity) Dr. Harris outlines a Black American healing supper in a format of her own invention, inspired by the Jewish Haggadah, with statements of intention to read before a feast of pickled black-eyed peas and turkey casserole with okra, baked tomatoes and rice.
Every part of the meal is a creative act, and though she doesn’t expect readers to follow her guidelines precisely — where’s the fun in that? — Dr. Harris hopes the book works as a fresh invitation to gather this year, to find meaning in creating and sustaining new rituals.
“Finding ways to come together in community leads us to find ways of healing,” she said. “And we need a healing.”
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