Edible Michiana Holiday 2022

a nice vegetable garden, so there were always plenty of vegetables. She had an English pea. I think we just called them green peas, but she called them English peas . They grew in our garden. She had a special dish that she did with that. I know that there was onion in it, and salt and pepper. But there was something else that made those peas like nothing else. I’ve never tasted a pea like that before. But coming home, it’s not been the same. And she’s been gone—I’m 73 now, I was 20 when she died—so she’s been gone a lot of years, but I’ve never had that same sense of coming home. We were poor, but we were never hungry, and on Sunday there was always enough for us, and my Uncle Pate, who had been drunk from the night before, but knew where to come—to go to the cotton field on Monday, he would come and eat with us. Uncle Charlie would come and eat with us and a couple of other men who were single men, and not all just single men. But they came, and they ate. My first home would be at my grandmother’s table. There have been some others since. But there was something different about that feel that just can’t be replaced. “A KITCHEN IS SOMETHING THAT UNITES THE WHOLE FAMILY.” Johari Lweno: I was born and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Because I am a woman, cooking is part of my culture. In Swahili we say mwanamke jiko , a woman is a kitchen. A kitchen is something that unites the whole family. So, as a woman, I am required to learn and know how to cook. Cooking for me is—is me. It’s Johari. I love the art of cooking. I went through difficult times and cooking helped me to go through those times. I used cooking as a therapy.

I’ll talk about a dish: a pilau . It is an Indian rice, but the Swahili culture is kind of mixed with Indian, Arabic, English, Portuguese, Germany. So, from all those people who came to the coast of East Africa, we took a little bit here and there, and we formed Swahili culture. Pilau rice, mainly when I was growing up, it will be eaten on the special occasion, for example, Eid Mubarak, Christmas day, a wedding day. It’s a special food. You don’t eat pilau every day, unless you’re very wealthy, because you have to get the best rice. There’s a lot of spices that have to be mixed together. You have to put some potato; it’s either meat or chicken. There’s a lot that goes in it, so you need money to make pilau rice. It becomes a community thing, because first of all, it’s cooked on the wooden cooking place, so the guys would go look for bricks, would go look for firewood. And the girls, everybody, one of them will be peeling onions, another one peeling garlic, another one will be mixing the spices, another one will be chopping potatoes, and another one will be making sure the rice is clean, another one preparing peas, this one is cutting carrot. Until the pilau is done. You’re all tired, and everybody took part in making that pilau. That’s what I miss: making things, and the whole house being part of that process of cooking that particular food. It takes the whole community to come to make food for special occasions. When those times come, I feel alone. Olyvia Searcy: For me, same as Johari, I grew up cooking. My family is originally from Canton, Mississippi. I probably learned how to do black-eyed peas and white northern beans at 8. Choosing just one thing is hard, because I would want to go with collard greens, I would want to go with my Aunt Meat— and we called her Aunt Meat because she was big. Wheelchair-bound and big. But she did all her cooking from that wheelchair. As long as you could move her around, she was able to cook and stir from that wheelchair. That’s amazing to me.

Dé Bryant: Tell us the story of that dish or ingredient that makes you feel like home. And home can be this place that everybody gathered, or it might be that dish that everybody in the family keeps trying to duplicate, but we can’t, because Grandmama brought it over from the home country and she, like our grandmama—we called her Mama Little Bit. She’s taller than I am—most people are taller than I am—but we called her Mama Little Bit because she really was the smallest of them before I came along, and bless her heart, she gave us everything in the recipe except one ingredient, so it never quite tasted like hers. But she would pat us on the back and tell us how good it was, and there’d be that secret smile. We didn’t find out until much later that we were doomed to failure, but we had great fun making stuff. So what’s the story? What’s your story? Nimbilasha Cushing: I’m certainly the oldest person here. I was born in St. Louis, but I grew up in western Tennessee with my grandparents. They raised me after my mother had died when I was 2, so my first exposure to cooking would be my grandmother, whom we called Big Mama for a couple of reasons: She was big, and everybody called her that, Big Mama or Cook, because there was always a pot of something going, and people knew that they could stop by, especially on Sunday, and there was going to be enough to share. After we spent half a day in church we would come, and she would have prepared most of the food the night before, so it was just heating up. We lived in the country. We were sharecroppers—we had no running water in the house, anything like that. So we carried water to wash everything in the tub outside. She had a wood stove that she cooked on top of. She cooked in the oven with not a gauge about what temperature or how long, and there was nothing peculiar to her, that’s what the women did that I grew up with, who were like my grandmother—and they could just put down! We always had

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