Photo by Siobhán Egan
“A cookbook can serve simply as a compendium of recipes or it can offer a story of a people and place", writes Matthew Raiford, in the introduction to his blessing of a book — and indeed, the title, means, in the Gullah or Geechee language, “bless and eat”. “This is my origin story.” It’s a story he tells both in outline in this introduction, and which speaks too through every recipe in the book. The Gullah Geechee community are the descendants of slaves who lived and still live on the coastal islands and low country along the coast of the Southeastern United States, and Raiford’s story starts with his great-great-great-grandfather, Jupiter, a descendant of the Tikar people of what is now Cameroon, who was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1812. Raiford himself spent 10 years in the military, living and eating around the world, before embarking on a physiology degree which he abandoned to train as a chef. He has now returned to farm the land he grew up with, bringing everything he has learnt, in the world and in the kitchen, to work the land, connect with the history and food of his community — “the alchemy of Native American fires, Spanish conquest, Caribbean inflection, and West African ingenuity” — and this book is the culmination of it all.
There are recipes that speak intimately of his family, such as Nana’s Sweet Potato Pie, his mother’s Brown Sugar Molasses Pound Cake, and the Smokin’ Hot’n’Sweet Crab Dip that, says Raiford, is an ode to his father, a baker who couldn’t find work as a pastry chef or cook and so took a job as a crab boiler. And there are recipes too that bring the tastes of his travels and studies to the food of home: Basic Beer Bread with Whipped Feta; Watermelon Salad with Heirloom Tomatoes and Sangria Vinaigrette; Berbere-Spiced Short Ribs; Za’atar Roasted Chicken; Rose Petal Quail. In these pages, too, you can learn how to roast a hog, make Smothered Pork Chops with Molasses Cornbread and Hot Buttermilk Biscuits with Honey Butter. And I want all of it. But the recipe I’ve chosen to share with you today is for Gullah Rice, a bright, beautiful bowl of comfort.
Excerpted from Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer. Copyright © 2021 CheFarmer Matthew Raiford and Amy Paige Condon.
Photography © 2021 by Siobhán Egan.
Reproduced by permission of The Countryman Press, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
