Join MOFAD on Wednesday, June 11, as we celebrate Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine, the new cookbook from one of our preeminent culinary historians, Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Alongside the book’s editor, Francis Lam, Dr. Harris will reveal the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine. You’ll learn about the stories and recipes shared by friends she’s made over the years—people whose family dishes go back to the crucial era when Native peoples encountered Europeans and the enslaved Africans they brought with them—and leave with a new, in-depth, and delicious understanding of American culinary history.
Ticket includes access to Flavor: The World to Your Brain from 6 to 7 PM, bites from the book prepared by Chef Denzell Washington, and drinks.
Copies of Braided Heritage can be pre-purchased in a ticket bundle and during the program from our partner bookseller, BEM | books & more.
JESSICA B. HARRIS is the author, editor, and translator of seventeen books, including twelve cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African diaspora. Her IACP Award–winning book High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America has been adapted into a Netflix series. Harris is a professor emerita at Queens College/CUNY in New York and has written extensively for scholarly and popular publications. She served as the culinary consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture and their lauded restaurant, the Sweet Home Café. She holds lifetime achievement awards from the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Soul Summit, and the James Beard Foundation, which also inducted Harris into the Cookbook Hall of Fame.
photo by Nate Ryan
FRANCIS LAM is the host of the public radio show and podcast The Splendid Table, and is Editor-in-Chief at Clarkson Potter, a division within Penguin Random House that is a leader in cookbook publishing. An award-winning writer, Lam has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Bon Appetít, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, and the Financial Times.
BEM | books & more is a literary destination at the intersection of food and Blackness. Established by two sisters in January 2021 as an online bookstore, BEM is proud to serve as a home for readers, writers, cooks, and eaters passionate about Black cultures in all their diversity. Taking an expansive approach to the nexus of food, literature, and culture, BEM celebrates Black food by bringing works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry for readers of all ages into conversation with cookbooks and culinary studies to explore how what feeds us defines us.