Seeds And Their People - EP. 33: Ms. Valerie Erwin, Philly's Geechee Chef on the African Influence on American's Foodways

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

In late October, 2024, we (Chris and Owen) walked down our Germantown, Philadelphia street to interview our friend and neighbor Ms. Valerie Erwin on her porch.  We talked about traditional (and less traditional) Gullah Geechee foodways with a focus on rice, field peas, okra, cornbread, shrimp and grits, thyme, hog jowls, Nan-e berenji (a Persian rice cookie), duck confit with fried Hoppin' John, and much more. Of course, with Chris and Ms. Val on the same porch, there are lots of easy segues into the African influence on Southern food. We talked about her former restaurant, her work as a chef now, and we took a walk around her garden.  Here is an excerpt from Ms. Valerie’s bio from Les Dames D’escoffier’s member directory (with some updates): Valerie Erwin is a longtime Philadelphia chef who, for 12 years owned the critically acclaimed Geechee Girl Rice Cafe. Valerie specializes in the food of the Low Country—the coast of South Carolina and Georgia—where her grandparents were born. During its tenure, Geechee Girl was featured on many major media outlets, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Magazine, The Food Network, and NPR. For two years Valerie was the General Manager of EAT Café, a West Philadelphia neighborhood restaurant with an innovative pay-what-you-can model. Since 2020, Valerie has managed Farm to Families, a produce access program of St Christopher’s Foundation for Children. Valerie has served on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance—the country’s premier institution for the study of food and culture. She now serves on the board of the Wyck Historic House Garden and Farm, a Germantown historic home, and the People's Kitchen Philly, a mutual aid kitchen. Valerie spends her time catering, doing business consulting, and working on food related projects with cultural institutions such as the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Jazz Project. FOOD PLANTS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Sea Island Red Peas Sea Island Okra Hill Rice (Trinidad) Corn Thyme LINKS: Valerie Erwin / Geechee Girl Cafe on Instagram Anson Mills, Columbia, South Carolina Kilimanjaro Restaurant, Philadelphia Black Rice, by Judith Carney Chef Edna Lewis Culinary Historian Jessica B Harris Culinary Historian Michael W Twitty Fish Pepper episode on Seeds and Their People THIS EPISODE SUPPORTED BY: YOU! Please become a Patron for $1 or more a month at Patreon.com/trueloveseeds The No-Till Market Growers Podcast Network (which includes our friends at the Seed Farmer Podcast) Scribe Video Center and WPEB, West Philly Community Radio   ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Valerie Erwin Our son, Bryan :) Elissa Fredeen of Scribe Video Center

I was just whacking at normal. Reporting live, reporting live, this is Brian. We're in Germantown, Philadelphia, and you are listening to Seeds and their people. Before we start, here is a word from our sponsors. Network. Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this show, you may also like the No-Till Market Garden podcast with co-host Mimi Castile, Natalie Lansberry, and yours truly, Alex Ball.

We interview growers, researchers, and others in sustainable ag community about everything from soil first farming practices to farm business management in the wild world of soil biology and health. So head over to your favorite podcast platform today and subscribe to the No-Till Growers Network. Welcome to Seeds and Their People. I'm Chris Bowden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sankofer Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We are a seed company offering ancestral seeds grown by farmers who preserve their beloved tastes of home for their diasporas and beyond through keeping seeds and their stories in community.

This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by our listeners. Thank you so much to our Patreon members. patreon.com slash true love seeds who subscribe for as little as one dollar per month to support this storytelling work. This episode features our neighbor and friend, Miss Valerie Irwin, who we've known for years through collaborating on cooking lessons with the youth at Chris's farm, running into each other at seed swaps at the library, visits to our farm parties and a lovely dinner party right here during the Black Farmers Conference, exchanging vegetables, seeds, and tubers in passing on the block and so on.

Here's an excerpt from Ms. Valerie's bio from Le Dame de Scofier's member directory. Valerie Irwin is a long-time Philadelphia chef, who, for 12 years, owned the critically acclaimed Gitchie Girl Rice Cafe. Valerie specializes in the food of the low country, the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where her grandparents were born. During its tenure, Gichi Girl was featured on many major media outlets, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Magazine, the Food Network, and NPR. For years, Valerie was the general manager at Eat Cafe, a West Philadelphia neighborhood

restaurant with an innovative pay-what-you-can model. Since 2020, Valerie has managed farm to families, a produce access program of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children. Valerie has served on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance, the country's premier institution for the study of food and culture. She now serves on the board of the Wic Historic House, Garden and Farm, a Germantown historic home, and the people's kitchen, Philly, a mutual aid kitchen. Valerie spends her time catering, doing business consultation, and working on food-related projects with cultural institutions such as the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Jazz Project. And here we are sitting on Ms. Valerie's porch. So, Ms. Valerie, how would you

introduce yourself and your relationship to cooking in food ways and welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for coming to my house. I have always been interested in the relationship between food and culture. The way I understand is more expansive than when I was first interested, but I've always been interested in like how people cook and what things stay the same and what things change and and unusual ingredients well unusual to me at least in ingredients I mean but I will say mostly I just really like good food like I'm not that interested in like holding on to something that doesn't taste good unless you know I guess if I were in a famine but you know in general I want food that

taste good, and then the next thing is I wanted to have an interesting story, and I wanted to have really, like, high-quality ingredients. What's an example of something you have not held on to and one that you have? Oh, so this is a weird thing. I wouldn't, when I was growing up, I never liked stewed greens, like collard greens, which we had a lot, or my mother would make a mixture of stewed greens, which I really thought of as one big pot of bitter. And I never even like stewed string beans that much. And it took me a while to like sort of unravel the fact that I didn't like the fact that they were cooked so much. It wasn't that I didn't like those vegetables. So when I figured that out and I figured out ways of cooking them less than I liked

them better. And oddly enough, once you start liking something, You can like it in different ways. So in some ways, I sort of came full circle and I can. It's not my preferred way. But if somebody gives me a bowl of greens, then, you know, I eat them and I like them. But it really took a lot to get there. And kind of on, you know, with that same subject, just the way that I cook greens, which is very different than the way most people cook them is something.

You know, like that was an innovation that I came up with really because I'd worked in restaurants so when I make like collard greens or kale or something like that unless they're like really young where you can just saute them raw I blanched them in a big pot of water and then shock them in cold water and drain them and then I cook them after that like I saute them or something like that or you know even put dressing on them and that kind of thing but that was really a technique that came from years of working in restaurants where that's a very common way to cook green vegetables so that you can hold them. Before we get too deep into it, you know, we heard words in the introduction like

Gullah Ghi and Low Country, and I think for some of our listeners, those will be new terms, and I'd like to see if you could tell our listeners a little bit about what is Gala Gichi, what is the low country, and what's your relationship to that. Ghi's and kind of the parallel ethnic group Gala are the descendants of enslaved Africa. who lived on the coast and islands of South Carolina and Georgia. There's a thing called the Gallaguchi Carter that goes from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Those are the parameters.

My mother's parents were from Charleston and my father's parents were from Savannah. And so they had very similar food ways. And my mother was born in Philadelphia, but there were things that she made that her mother had made. mother had made in Charleston that we you know we ate when we were we were growing up um I will say we didn't necessarily like when I was growing up I mean obviously I knew my family was from Charleston and Savannah but first of all we didn't go there when we went I had one aunt that was left in Savannah and I did visit her but it wasn't like the family trip to Georgia you know there we had five kids we were not tripping anywhere and um but

But the rest of my father's family had moved to Miami. And when my grandparents came to Charleston, it was my grandmother, my grandfather, my great-aunt, my great-grandmother. So basically, we didn't have any relatives left in Charleston. So in a lot of ways, the food was the thing that connected us to the area rather than, like, physically being able to visit. So this is one story. I have one of my sisters, when she was in graduate school, she went to graduate school. This was the co-op in upstate New York, and she lived in a boarding house that a black woman owned. And she said, one day, she was like in the hallway, and a man, another boarder who was an older man, looked at her and said, oh, what a pretty little Gucci girl.

And she said, what does that mean? He said, I bet your daddy know what it mean. And so she called my father up, and he's my father. And he said, oh, yeah, he about right. And so that's kind of where, you know, that was the thing that sort of put that in our mind. And we knew the word, Ghii, but it was really a pejorative term. And when I opened the restaurant, when I opened my restaurant, it was very small. And, you know, we had one stove, which is unusual for restaurants.

Most lines have at least two stoves and eight burners or 12 burners. And I had one stove. And I think I might have had four. I might have had six burners. So we were looking for a tight concept. And I have a friend who's in the industry, and she was giving suggestions. Like, you know, there's a place in Phoenix that does pizza, and there's places that do noodles.

And I'm like, I don't know, I can't see noodles in Germantown. And my sister came into my room one day and said, how about if we call it Gucci Girl and do rice? It was brilliant. I will give her all the credit for that. And it was a very easy concept. concept to build from to, you know, sort of pull in things that, you know, that we, we grew up with and, you know, and give them a platform.

Yeah, I'm really relating to, well, first of all, I mean, I feel like every time I talk with you, I hear more of your story, which I guess is how relationships build and grow. I didn't realize that you all didn't go back down south that often for some reason. I'm used to the very classic Philadelphia story of many black Philadelphians are Gitchie descended, you know, or otherwise from, from, you know, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, those sorts of places, right? And I'm used to that story of them always going back down south, and that was the way that they maintained connection, but that you all sort of bought the culture to yourselves as opposed to going back to the culture. There's something really powerful about that. I'm wondering, one thing that I think about is, you know, me as a southerner, you know, from a different part of the South coming up here, I couldn't find a lot of our traditional foods, you know, the handful of traditional vegetables, you know, the different peas that we eat. And even mustard greens and turn of greens, you know, is not super commonly eaten here by most folks.

This is a collard green country, right? So I'm curious as to how you all found some of those foods. Was it difficult to find, you know, maybe the meats or the cuts of meat or the different things that I know that we might have in common in terms of southern eating? So one thing I would say is I'm quite a bit older than you. And so some things that we had all the time, I don't see as much now. So I tell people that, like, my mother made Hop and John, but she only made it at New Year. I think she probably cooked at New Year's Eve. And so Hopin John is a pilaf with rice.

and some kind of field peas. So usually my mother would use cow peas and that she would, you know, she could buy in the store. They were dried. And if she couldn't get cowpeas, she would use black-eye peas. But she also cooked that with a hog gel. I can't tell you if I've ever seen a hog gel in the store. But that, you know, like that was common enough to every year,

you know, unfortunately you open that pot and there would be rice and peas and sort of floating on top a hog jar. jail with the teeth. My mother would make, mostly we had collards, but she would make turnip greens, and she would, when she made turnip greens, she would have them with the turnips. She cooked the turnips, or she would cook mustard greens, or she would cook a combination. So this was in the 60s, and I just think some of those things, you know, like the market kind of dictated, and some of those things fell off. Like, even Black IPs, I remember as a child,

being able to get fresh black eyed peas in the pod in the summer. Like, in Philadelphia, and I don't remember where. Like, I don't know if it was at the Italian market, if it was just up on the avenue, but enough so that I distinctly remember what they look like. We grew up eating salted fat back, and you can find it, but you have to look kind of hard, and it's often just frozen. Whereas, like, you know, you could just go to the grocery store

and, like, next to the bacon, there would be salt pork, and there would be fat back and you could just buy it. You know, I've kind of brought those memories with me and the technique from childhood. Wow, so many things that you said that, you know, I'd love to just pick apart. Yeah, you know, one thing that was surprising me is that you said that you could find fresh black-eyed peas,

you know, any kind of fresh POP in the pod. Because one thing that I have noticed, it was another surprise to me about, you know, black folks in the way we eat here in Philadelphia, Philadelphia was that most of the people, when I go to market with my peas, because I grow those traditions, I couldn't find them. So I started to growing them, right? And I'm vegetarian, so I don't have to get upset about not finding fat back, you know, or salt pork or any of that stuff, or sals or brains, or any of that stuff that we grew up with. But I was surprised that

folks here were not familiar with eating fresh peas. So that you say that you could get fresh peas at one time. I struggle with selling them in the pod. Whereas when I go back to Mississippi, you know, if you bought out the amount of crowded peas, the purple whole peas in the pot that folks would just hop on it, you know, and I'm selling myself, you know, and I can, they barely move if I bring them, so that's interesting yet. Folks hadn't known the concept of eating fresh peas. I really relate as well to what you were saying about having them, having to learn how to cook some of our traditional foods in different ways. I think for me that happened because I was You know, I chose vegetarianism at the age of 12.

Long story. I also didn't like that we cooked our vegetables to death in the South. I don't know if you heard this story before. I was told that we started doing that because, I guess, in the 20s, you know, when they were sending out traveling nurses and nutritionists and stuff in the South, that they were, because of lack of refrigeration and poor refrigeration, they were really telling people, teaching people to, almost as a hygienic method to boil all of your vegetables down all the way, almost too much,

to protect you from, you know, foodborne disease. I don't know. Have you heard that story? I have not heard that story, but I hear a lot of stories about how black food ways are based on, you know, like getting the lesser kinds of food, you know, the actual provisions and things like that. but I find that hard to believe. It's possible. I think that if you look at the African foodways,

they are more likely to have one-pot meals and they're more likely to have greens that are cooked with other things. Typically, it would be fish rather than meat. But I think that's more of the situation. And the other thing, I mean, there is something about lack of refrigeration. Not that you have to cook food to death. If it's raw, it's going to go bad really fast. Whereas, you know, if it's cooked, you might be able to keep it for a little longer.

You might be able to put it in a cool place or keep it in a hot place and, you know, sort of keep it out of that danger zone. So I would imagine that it was more a taste preference kind of built from tradition than something about, you know, the food going bad. I don't know. I mean, it's possible, but I doubt. I've never heard that. I will say about the field peas. So I remember seeing peas in the pod, but I don't remember seeing, like, a variety of peas the way that you can get in the south.

When I was on the border of the Southern Foodways Alliance, I would go to different things in the south, and, you know, like if you go to a farmer's market or even just a regular market, they would have peas just, like, already shelled in a bag. And so I spent years trying to get farmers to grow field peas. And most of the time, I got a lot of, what are they? Right. I remember calling Lancaster Farm Fresh, the farmers cooperative in this area,

and asking the director about field peas, and he said, like, are they like green peas? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so it wasn't really until I was in the south that I saw all those different kinds of peas. And then I keep thinking that chefs in Philadelphia don't know field peas. And so that's like my big thing would be if you could get it to chefs who would love them, you know, speaking as a chef, then their popularity would expand to the rest of the population. Well, maybe I'll try that because that has been a serious challenge for me as a farmer. You're right, I think.

If you had people don't know, I think it's funny that you said that farmers would say, well, what is that, right? It's interesting to me what food ways and other sort of cultural attachments, you know, from our shared southern heritage is, which ones made it up? Because everything wasn't going to make it, right? You know, all the traditions weren't going to make it. Some stuff got boiled down. Some stuff got thrown out completely. black folks when we got up here and you had a couple of generations born up here

had come under the contact of many different influences that sort of change and the many traditions probably fell off in that way as well I know being from Mississippi and from the South in general it was a surprise to me how large the black Muslim movement was in Philadelphia. People don't talk about that outside of Philly nobody outside of Philly nobody knows that Philly is such a large

largely Muslim city you know and I know that that would have necessitated a change in food ways for black people different movements within that group right you don't have pork anymore that cuts out a whole lot but getting back to what you were saying earlier around I'm interested in this idea that you know that our techniques of cooking because there's all this dispute and I think right brother Michael Twitty talks a lot about it too like you know why do we cook the foods the way we cook them you know

how much of it is African influence and how much of it is the South you know you have these theorists who say that we our culture and the africanisms were completely eliminated right as a result of colonization and slavery and anything that we have here is something that was created you know in the southern influence and white culture mostly largely uh poor white culture but then you know there are other folks who say like you and i think i tend to agree that many of these foodways did come from africa the idea of cooking when greens are cooked in west africa i've noticed they are also cooked down all the way down they'll run all the way down, you know, into a soup and a stew

and that traditional pairing of a starch and a soup as, you know, as you said, this one-pot meal, right? To me, that's what beans and cornbread is. That's what greens and cornbread is. But to use meat as a flavoring and not necessarily as the main dish. So, yeah, I think there's really something to that, what you're saying. Well, anyone who says that the Africanisms have been bred out of black American foodways has never tasted food from the Caribbean or from Brazil or from West Africa,

because there's so many things that are the same. Okra is the big one. Like Jessica Harris talks about if you see Okra, you know that Africa's in the pot. The fact that they have gumbo in all those places. Obviously, gumbo didn't come from Scotland or England. but what you put in it might change depending on what's around where you are. And that's why, like, gumbo in New Orleans doesn't really have tomatoes because they just didn't have them all the time.

Whereas gumbo, like, the gumbo that I grew up eating was a tomato gumbo. Yeah, I don't believe all that. Well, I'm curious, especially since you were on the board of Southern Foodways Alliance, but also have this particular focus on Galagichi cuisine. From my understanding, there's what we've heard about Galagichi people, but also about Creole people, there's certain groups in the South that have more of a connection to African culture, language, food, and Galagichi is one of them.

And I'm wondering if you could speak about that in particular, like how Galagichi food is the same and different from other southern food. So one of the big things about, like, Gucci food ways is it's based on the sea. A lot of it's based on the sea because it's, they're not, you know, we're an island people. And so things like shrimp and grits was, you know, what Chris was saying about, you know, a stew and a starch. So that's basically what shrimp, shrimp and grits is. It's a sauce and a starch. And we, my mother's family made, like, and the one that I make is a like, and the one that I make is a

light-colored shrimp and grits, so it's very, I mean, really doesn't have much in it. It has flour and it has stock or maybe water and the shrimp and onion or something like that, maybe some butter. But my father would make one that was more like what you think of as a toupee in New Orleans that was more tomato-based and spicier, but still it was like a sauce that you ate on top of a starch. When I was growing up, we just called it shrimp. And when I opened my restaurant, I called it Low Country Strip because I had to come up with a name. But if we had it for breakfast, we would have it on grits.

And if we had it for dinner, we'd have it on rice. And it was like the same dish. And there was a lot of stuff like that. Like, we would have smothered chicken sometimes for Sunday breakfast or Saturday breakfast when my parents were home. But if we had them for breakfast, we'd have them on grits. And if we had it for dinner, we'd have it on rice.

So one thing I will say is the retention of the African influence mostly has to do with numbers. So on the sea islands, the Africans who were there were very much left alone. It was not easy to get to the mainland. And also the planters, the Europeans were afraid of tropical diseases like malaria. So they would leave the enslaved people on the islands by themselves or maybe with some kind of overseers. So they had that big, you know, African community. The other thing is South Carolina was the biggest port for enslaved Africans during the slave trade. So there was a constant influx of people from Africa to kind of reinforce that culture.

And in New Orleans, they had that density. population. But around the rest of the south and certainly in the north, like in the 18th century, New York was the second biggest port for enslaved people other than Charleston. As New York moved away from an agrarian economy, they had fewer and fewer, they had less and less need for enslaved people. There were still enslaved people in New York. Don't get me wrong. But there wasn't that same density. And because of that, even though there is a robust Dutch African presence in New York and then later English African, it didn't have the same density. So those people couldn't maintain their culture to the same degree. And I feel like in the South in general,

the reason that the culture was, it was because of concentration. That's the reason that the culture was able to survive. And there are now several varieties of seeds that we can grow that are attributed to the Gologichi communities. And I guess that's just as it was in any part of the South, but maybe because of the isolation, that's why we have the Sea Island red pea, the Sea Island red okra, these different types of rice is because of the connection to Sierra Leone. I know that you're known as a rice connoisseur or, you know, a champion of rice.

And I'm wondering if you could speak to the rice culture in the low country and how that connects to Africa, but also how you've brought that into the future. So rice was the staple grain in South Carolina, in the low country. I think it probably came to, I would have to look it up, but I think it came to the low country. the early 1700s. It might have been even a little bit earlier than that. And it was supposedly brought by a Malagasy sea captain who traded it for something. So that might be a cockerel. But English planters wanted to grow rice because they knew it was a valuable crop. They knew, particularly in the Catholic countries, they would eat rice during Lent. So there was a ready

market for it. But as you can imagine, if you came from England, Scotland, you didn't know how to grow rice. And who knew how to grow rice? Africans knew how to grow rice. So there would be like commissions to capture people from what was called the rice coast, which is now called the rice coast of West Africa, Africans who already knew how to grow grow rice. So you can see ads from, you know, from newspapers of that time, like either looking for people from the rice coast or that they're selling people from the rice. rice coast. So those were the people who built the whole rice growing system in the low country to great sacrifice. It was a really, it was a miserable way to live because it was rice that

was grown in water. In Africa, they had upland rice that didn't have to be in water. But that was, but first of all, they were going to a low country. So they were growing the kind of rice that had to be flooded. But the Africans were the people who built the dikes and the system to control how the water flooded the fields and then did all the harvesting and the threshing and you know everything about it and people literally died in those fields because it was it was such a miserable way to live but but they also not only were the Africans were able to keep their own rice rice growing and rice eating traditions they also were able to to bring the Europeans into that so that everybody in South Carolina ate rice.

So right up to the Civil War, when the South lost its labor force, and then rice growing moved to Texas and California. But rice eating stayed in South Carolina, even though they didn't, for the most part, didn't grow their own rice anymore. So I grew up eating rice literally every day. We had rice for dinner every day, except if we had spaghetti, and even if we had spaghetti,

my father was likely to eat spaghetti sauce on rice. And so I tell a story that I went to a neighbor's house when I was about maybe eight, and when I, for dinner, and when I came home, my mother asked me how dinner was, and I said, dinner was fine, but Ms. Jackson forgot the rice. So that's like the story of my upbringing that we ate rice all the time. And when, you know, like when I started working in restaurants and also when I got exposed to other kind of food,

I certainly didn't feel the necessity to have rice at every meal. And so I got away from that. But what I did realize was that in restaurants, there was no good rice. Like, no good rice. If you tried to buy a case of rice, it would be 25 one-pound boxes of rice. And everybody used parboil, which, You know, I know they use carboyle in the Caribbean and even in West Africa, but it doesn't even taste real to me.

So I did, you know, so I spent a lot of years, like making Uncle Ben's rice and thinking that this stuff is horrible, and I can't believe that people think it's good. And so you love rice so much that it was in the name of your restaurant. And I'm wondering, I know that you're moving to the future, right? You have ways of cooking rice that's not how you were, were raised. And I'm wondering how you can talk about the evolution of your relationship to rice and why you put it in the name of your restaurant. I put it in the name of the restaurant really as a tribute to the people, my ancestors, other enslaved people who had been captured

and put in the servitude in the service of rice. And the recognition that even though that was tragic. We still had this food that we could trace back to Africa. And that in a way was kind of comforting. So let me first say that most of the time when I make rice, I just make a pot of rice. And I make it the same way that I made it when I was growing up. So I don't do fancy rice a lot of times. Well, one thing, once you put rice in the name of a restaurant, you know, you find out all kinds of rice. So I, you know, I had a customer whose family were rice growers in California. If people know about Lundberg, their family was kind of next door to Bloomberg's they're farming. You know what I had people like give me different kinds and also I bought

rice from Anson Mills. We discovered Anson Mills very early in the career of the restaurant because I knew they had grown Carolina Gold Rice. So that Carolina Gold Rice was the heirloom rice from South Carolina. And I wrote to the company and said I wanted to buy Carolina Gold Rice. And as it turned out, the article that I read was about a trial crop. So they didn't have any rice, but they referred me to somebody else, but they had grits and cornmeal. So at the very beginning, I bought grits and cornmeal from Anson Mills. And then later I bought rice from them, and they had different kinds. So they had a black rice, and they had Carolina gold rice, but they had a brown Carolina gold rice.

So I kind of got the experience of cooking a lot of different kinds of rice and doing, you know, sometimes the same thing. You know, sometimes it would just be a pot of rice and you put stew on top of it. Like, you know, I would make risotto out of Carolina gold rice because the one that we bought, it's a long grain rice, but it's very soft, so it breaks when it threshes. And the tradition in South Carolina is the whole grains, they would send abroad to sell, and the broken grains, which they call cracked, the cracked rice, or they called in Midlands, they would eat at home. So we always bought the cracked rice, you know, you can make rice pudding out of it,

or you can make risotto because it was cracked, the starch would come out really easily, kind of like arboreo rice, the Italian rice. So, you know, so I would do things like that. Or I knew someone who's hers and is Iranian, and he was telling me about a cookie that they had called Narang Berenge. I think I might have to give you a correction on that. But it's a rice cookie, and I was actually doing a meal with Glenn Roberts from Anson Mills, And so we were doing different things with rice. And I happened to find a recipe for that.

So you make it with a rice flour and you boil syrup. And that's the sweetener. And it kind of, and it has butter in it. And it makes this batter that looks just like a regular cookie dough. And the day you would usually make it, roll it into little discs, and then they have a stamp that you'd put on it to make it, like make a pretty design on the top. And so I did things like that, like trying to expand the stuff that we were making so that it was still interesting, but wasn't completely disconnected from the kind of food we were doing. And you're holding some rice right now that we grew, and I know that Chris grows it at his farm too.

And you were just at our farm party where one of Chris's former co-workers, Lex, was talking about their practices around growing it, and those are also gendered practices. And I'm wondering if you can speak to any, whatever that brings up for you, this rice, that story. When I first got involved with the Southern Freeways Alliance, which I still, I have to give a shout to Glenn Roberts about that because he knew about us and he told the Southern Freeways Alliance about us. And I got asked to speak at one of the symposiums. And I was speaking after a woman named Judith Carney who writes about the history of rights, but the historical development of rice and particularly about the connection between rice in Africa and West Africa and rice in the Americas. So I read her book called Black Rice, and she talks about rice being the cultivation and care of rice being gendered.

And basically, men did the building, the dyke building and things like that and planted the rice and harvested it. But after that, women did the threshing and the winnowing, the keeping of the grain and the cooking. And in my house, my father was really like the gourmet chef. My father had worked at a restaurant. He had just a really good palate and really good technique. My mother cooked, but my father would say that when they got married, he thought she could cook, but he found out the only thing she could make was cake and rice.

But one of my sisters says about my mother's family, the Peterson family, he says, you know, the Peterson's don't cook, which, of course, not exactly true because you know they had to eat but in the irwin family like you would like when we saw our family our relatives in miami like you know we might spend the whole day cooking and thinking and talking about what we're going to cook the next meal but the petersons were not like that but that being said my mother always cooked the rice and family always and my father would say i can't really cook rice and and so like if my mother wasn't home or something he would cook a pot of rice and complained the whole time

because he didn't like the way it came out and I just thought that that was like a family thing but after reading Judith's book it's like oh my goodness this is the whole cultural thing that women cook the rice I have a book black rice I think which might have some of that information and I have not spent as much time with that

book as with her other really celebrated work in the shadow of slavery which I actually use as a textbook. You're not familiar with that? I don't know that one. I don't know that one. All right. Get that one.

We'll find that one for you, but I teach from it. I taught from it actually this week, teaching about Calilu and traditions around cooking greens. It was really interesting to me, Ms. Val, to hear you talk about how y'all ate rice every day. That's something that I, that's one of the few things that I think I did know about South Carolina. Because Mississippi, even though it's all the south, it's a world away, you know, maybe several worlds away from the coastal black southern cultures.

Just thinking earlier, referring back to our earlier discussion about traditional West African, a starch and a stew-based meals. And I was thinking as you were talking about how you all not only ate the rice at night, but then it could be repurposed again the next day in the morning. We did that, too, in Mississippi. That reminded me of ways that I didn't necessarily grow up eating that often, but I know what common to my, you know, my dad particular, you know, my parents, my grandparents, certainly in great-grandparents' traditions, because we would have cornbread almost every day. So cornbread took the place of rice for us.

We had some corn product every day. We ate grits in the morning, and we ate cornbread in the evening with almost whatever it was that we were eating, and my mother still made. makes a pan, at least a pan of cornbread at least a week. But it made me remember my dad talking about growing up and eating clabber, where they would take that cornbread and break it up in buttermilk and then eat that in the morning. I would imagine that's the cornbread from the night before. So we ate corn too, and we had cornbread, but not so regularly, but enough that I knew

how to make cornbread. And cornbread was something, like, there was certain things my mother, I don't remember my mother cooking. Like, I don't remember my mother ever making cornbread. I don't even remember my mother making biscuits. My father made biscuits. My father made cornbread. But everybody ate them.

So a lot of times, if we had cornbread left over, the way that you might now put cornbread in a microwave to steam it a little, we would steam it on top of a pot of rice. So, yeah. So either, like, if you were cooking rice, when it got to the end so that it was still a little moisture left, or if we were reheating rice, you put the rice in the pot, put a little bit of water. it and you know let it get warm and then we put the cornbread on top and steam it to warm it up so I mean like sometimes you know you might toast it or on a in a frying pan but that was a lot of times the way that we did it and so this is my earliest memory of thinking about food connected to a culture so my father I don't know if we were cooking or if we I don't know but he was saying that when he was growing up, so when he was growing up, his father died when he was very

young. His mother worked. His grandmother really raised them. And so I would hear a lot about things that his grandmother cooked. And he said, sometimes when my grandmother had cornbread left over, she would crumble it up and like fry it with onions or something like that. And then we'd eat that. And she called it kuskos. And he said to me, and you know, my grandmother was never in Africa and it was like oh my goodness well what is this stuff that and I remember looking it up in a dictionary because the only thing I had and I don't don't remember if they talked about in the this dictionary definition all I remember is taught them mentioning millet and maybe they talked about the kind of like what you know like the Middle Eastern kuscus that we think of now

but since that time you know I've had a lot more time to you know think about what what this was, but there was a thing that I remembered, like, so there were things that people ate in Africa that we eat, or some version, some version of it. And so I did an event once with a woman named Yuma Vah who owns Kilimanjaro in West Philadelphia, which, despite the fact that it's named after an East African Mountain is a West African restaurant. Yeah. So Yuma says it's because people know the Kilimanjara is in Africa. So she's Senegalese. And in Senegal, they, what they call kuskous is steamed millet. So since that time when I've read about it, it's like the Middle Eastern Kuskuz,

there is a theory that that, which is Semolina mixed with water until it makes little grains. They think that that was actually an attempt to replicate millet because they couldn't grow millet in that kind of climate. Anyway, so, yeah, so I think about corn a lot, too. And I kind of think about that particular experience with, like, you know, hearing about the cornbread and hearing about the kusk-k-k-os being, like, the start of the thing that made me interested in, like, food is a historical, you know, subject, food, you know, connected with geography and food connected with a culture.

So, you know, cornbread, that was the whole start of it. Yeah, well, and I close off my thought, thinking about cornbread, because I can talk about cornbread all day. Is it, as you're talking, also bringing back memories, I grew up kind of in Wisconsin black Catholic culture in the South. And a lot of our friends and, you know, and my church members when I was younger were from Louisiana or from New Orleans area. Because, you know, they were older. They were still like, you know, they still spoke French. they still were very much connected to that, you know, to that Creole French African culture. And I remember them also talking about eating cuckoo.

And I particularly remember elder of my Miss Agnes Haywood, though despite her English last name, she's a French woman. And she talked about in the morning that they would eat cuckoo. And I believe that it also, it sounded to me like clabber. I'm not really sure. It sounded like either clabber or grits or something, but in a suit. Whoopie sort of situation? Have you heard of Kuku and Louisiana? I have.

And, oh, there's another word for it. But I have to think of for a minute. Yeah. But it was, yeah, more like a Gritz kind of thing. But it was like, that was something I heard, like, you know, when I would read about. Like, when you're running a restaurant, you have to come up with a menu, like, every week. You'd have to do a lot of reading to come up with things. But, yeah, there's a, yeah, like a Creole thing, and even the Cajuns do it in New Orleans.

They don't call it Cush. That's another one. That's another one that's in, you know, in the South and other places that made with, like, leftover cornbread. Yeah, a similar concept, yeah. I do a presentation on the African influence on American foodways, and I always have to put a thing there about like the things that we got from the Native Americans. So corn was our, you know, was the big thing. Corn didn't come from Europe and it didn't come from Africa. It came from the Americas, but there were a lot of foods that the indigenous Americans ate that Europeans just didn't

consider food. Right. But corn, they could recognize as being a grain. I mean, also because in a lot of ways, they couldn't grow like wheat and rye and things like that. It took a long time. and certainly in the south they couldn't grow it at all but they recognized corn as being a grain so that was something that even though it wasn't their grain they could eat it and i feel like the africans were the same thing it's like we know we don't know this grain but we know it's a grain and so we'll use it in the ways that we use grain you do a lot of clearly do a lot of storytelling through cooking and you said you would make your menu every week partially in order to tell the story.

And I'm wondering if you could give a couple examples of some dishes that you feel like really hit home in terms of telling a particular story well and tasting delicious and having a good response from your customers. Okay, well, you got me on the spot a little bit. So the one that I tell the most often is when I was about maybe 10 or 11 or something,

like that my mother my mother wasn't home was a Saturday morning mother's home she my mother played the piano for church a lot of times she had rehearsal on Saturday morning and my father decided that we were a bunch of lazy slugs and he made us you know what I might even younger in that because I only remember there being three of us and I was eight when my the next sister was born so but anyway and so he made us all get up and what I probably thought it was an ungodly hour but in fact was probably around 10 o'clock, and we were cleaning all this stuff, and then he's going to make lunch, and he made beans, and I didn't really like beans, and Lee didn't really like beans. My sister Missy liked beans, but, like, making us eat beans was akin to punishment, but that's not why

he did it. He did it because he had beans, and he made leftover beans, and I think they were probably a lot of beans, but there might have been, like, North, Great Northern or something like that, mixed with leftover rice, and then he fried fat back and fried the rice and the beans in the fat back. And then we, you know, we ate pieces of the fat back. So mind you, I hated beans, but I was also starving, you know, because we were doing our Oliver Twist cleaning in the daytime. So, of course, I ate it, and it was really delicious. And I don't know that I ever made that again, but I do remember it being really good. And so at my restaurant, I was making a do confi, which typically you would serve with, like in France, I would serve it maybe with

white beans or something like that, but I didn't really have white beans. And I had a very small restaurant, and I didn't want to buy something just for one dish. So it's like, well, I have black eyed peas, but black eyed peas are not starchy the way beans are. So then I would have to use a different, I'd have to put them in a bowl and, you know, those, I don't know what I'm going to do that either. So it's like, well, maybe I'll fry them the way daddy fried those rice and beans. And so I mixed rice and black eyed piece together, and I think I'd fried them in duck fat. I'd fried them in duck fat and called it crispy hopping John because it was the same ingredients as hopping John. My sisters would come in and order that, but it wasn't on the menu.

And I was like, huh. So they would order that all the time. And I also had a couple of customers. One time a customer came in and ordered a duck. And when he got it, he said, this isn't the duck you had before. And it was a ducked breast. and what he had had before was the confi, which you do with the leg. And confit is when you cook something slowly in fat.

So we would season the duck legs and then slowly cooked them in duck fat. So they got really tender. And then right before we served them, we would brown them off so the skin would get crisp. And he was like, I wanted that other duck. So I stopped getting whole ducks and I stopped getting duck breast, and I just did the confi. And I would always do it with crispy hop and done. But then, in addition to my sister, I had all these other people say, well, instead of the hoppin John on the menu, could I have that fried one? So eventually I took Hoffman John off and just kept crispy hopping John on.

Really? Wow. This is switching gears a little bit. I brought you this bag of Sea Island red peas that came up, volunteered in our garden night, and you said it volunteers in your garden, too. Is that something you've met as an adult? And can you talk to us a little bit about what you know about this pee? Well, so I know about this pee because of Anson Mills and because of Glenn Roberts, who owns Anson Mills. So they were the first people who sold it as a commercial crop. So I used to get Seattle and Red Peas from Anson Mills.

Occasionally they had other kinds of peas, but that was the one that they really emphasized the most. Right, there's a cream or white colored one too, right, like a lady pea. Like the lady peas and sometimes they're called rice peas. Yeah, I didn't get those. But, I mean, I've had them. And they're delicious. And when you're in the South, you can get lots of kinds of peas. And that's the thing that really whetted my appetite, the fact that I could just go.

So when I was in the South, if I go to a farmer's market, if I'm staying someplace with a refrigerator, I'll freeze bags of peas and then bring them home with me. And one time my sisters and I were in South Carolina I was trying to get Glenn Roberts to come to the house where we were renting and he couldn't come but he sent us all this product including and one of my sisters was gluten intolerant and he sent us sorghum flour and he sent us peas

and I brought those peas home but I also brought home fresh peas that I found in Charleston because I couldn't get them here so I have grown sea island red peas and I've also grown purple holes And I think that I've got that seed at a tulip seed swap. And I knew what it was because of Anson Mills. And there have been times when I've grown fiend plants and I've gotten enough to get, you know, a small harvest.

Those years I actually planted them and then, you know, so it was like deliberate. But since then, I've had volunteers and sometimes I pulled them out because there's a lot of volunteers. But like a few of them, I'll let them, you know, just go to when I get a tiny, tiny bit of fruit. So, like, you know, I get a cup of peas. And these are a pretty small seeded peas. So how does that affect the – how are they used in cooking differently? I mean, they're not that different, you know, except that they're small. You know, you just need more of them to make a pound or whatever or a cup.

But I don't feel like that the big difference is they're not – like, some of the other peas are easier to harvest when they're still green. So you get a fresh pea. But these, you know, they don't, it's hard to get them, you know, and also they dry very quickly. So they dry on the vine very quickly. So I have even, I gave up trying to get them as a fresh pea. But like when I had the whole peas, the purple holes, I would try to get some of them as fresh peas. Okay. This was my first year, I believe, growing, me personally growing a significant amount of Sea Island red peas.

I think Alexis grew Sealand Red Peas at our farm. before but that was kind of her thing and I didn't at that time know that much about it but I grew for the first time I think this year like you know a 100 foot row of it 90 foot row of it and and and it they dried so fast on the pod that I just assumed that oh this must be the way that they eat them in South Carolina they must only eat them dry which was a revelation to me in Mississippi we eat probably most of our peas in the sun in the summertime fresh like you know and like I said earlier that that was that was very mysterious when I came up here still have trouble pushing it at the market fresh peas to people I'm telling you Chris

chefs are the thin edge of the wedge you know it's it is very like when you know you know it's for a new for a new food stuff that's usually way I mean there's very few things where all of a sudden people started buying it and then chefs used it It's almost always the other way around, that chefs are the influencers. And the other thing is, chefs can buy a lot of something. You know, Omar from Honeysuckle. Yeah, so, you know. Yeah, I sell to Omar as well, too.

Not as much peas. Yeah. We haven't yet done that a lot. I mean, it's hard because there are not that many black restaurants in Philadelphia, so it's hard to get that, you know, in that way. And there are not many, like, sort of southern-influenced restaurants. That being said, it's such a delicious product that I feel like the only reason people don't cook it is because they don't know about it. I know that your work has also focused on food justice and feeding people through mutual aid.

And I'm wondering if you could at least speak to that for a moment. Like, I know that's been a long time focus of yours and I'll make sure we hear about it. You know, it's interesting because, you know, I was on a panel talking about mutual aid, and obviously, like, I like to cook, I like to feed people, and I like people to be able to eat. And that's kind of how I sort of drifted into this world. And it really, a lot of it was when I met Ben Miller and Christina Martinez, because they, you know, they would use food as a vehicle to get people together to talk about stuff. or, you know, especially people who maybe wouldn't all come together.

And it was so effective and so powerful. But really, my interest in food just has to do with accessibility and the ability for people to feed themselves. And so a lot of that work has come to be in food security work. So, like, I managed a not-for-profit restaurant, and I now run a food access program and I'm on the board of the people's kitchen and I work with with that but my in my soul my real my real concern is not making food for people but fixing the system so people will be able to have their own food and so that is the thing like I don't I don't want to stop with we made somebody a meal or we gave somebody produce Like as wonderful as that might be, as much as that could help the immediate problem, if that's your solution, that problem will never go away.

Thank you. Were there any, besides the food, you know, any other ways that you saw either growing up, either in your home or amongst other expatriate, Gucci people, you know, songs, phrases, little traditions or things that you remember. I know there was a concentration of folks in North Philly. Sometimes I find out that something that I just took for granted, but I would have to think a little bit. But like every time I find out one, it's like, what?

Like everybody doesn't say that? So let me think about it and get back to you. But yeah, there definitely are some. It's interesting because, like, my grandmother was from Charleston and people, you know, asked me if she, like, spoke to a Gala Cree. or something like that, and she really didn't. She really spoke standard English, but definitely with a, like, a Charleston accent,

which I didn't realize until I met somebody else from Charleston. I don't know if you know Son Mischo who does, yeah, okay. So one time, I don't know, I sent him a comment about E being the perfect non-binary. So my grandmother, grandmother, and great aunt, when they would talk, if they used, like, you know, anything, the second person, they would say E. Yeah, and it was like, I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know if that was she, and I don't know it was he, that was it.

But it wasn't any of those things. It was just like a general, yeah. So, like, that was something. But if my life depended on me, I could not imitate the way she spoke. I wish him that I could, but I can't. I wish I could remember. Like, I only remember it when I hear other people say, you know, say something. And it's like, oh, my God, that sounds like Nana.

Right. Yeah, maybe I got to catch you around some traditional foods and see if it inspires also, too, because I'm having trouble. I couldn't, though I grew up, you know, hearing our Black Mississippi speech, I couldn't just pull out anything right now. Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It can work like that. Yeah. Well, let's go to the garden. What do you do with your lemongrass at the end of this?

They cut it back to like here, or here. And then I put it in the greenhouse or in the house. All right. And it'll start growing back right away. I'm going to give this to the beveen, and I've said that she wants a pot. Oh, you're not going to keep any of it, because you can keep it in the house. I know. A little bit in a pot up in the sunny window.

Is this also limousiness? That's the other one? Yeah. I kill houseplants. We do too. Yeah. We're out-door plant people. Oh, speaking of which, you gave, so you gave me this one,

and then you gave me another, a little. one. Oh yeah. What is that? So the big one is... I know what this is the oregano brujo. Right. Yeah. And then this is I got from Edis Brown. She just calls it Vix because it smells like Vicks vapor rub. But I think its name is Plectrathus. Okay. I'll look it out. That's what's... Which one? I think they're both. No, oh the oregano brujo is the big leaf time or Cuban time or Cuban oregano. And sometimes I make tea out of it. You know what I like to do? do, which I learned from, oh, who did I learn it from? I think I learned it from this

nursery, the South Asian vegetables in Oakland, they have an episode. But you just eat a raw leaf when you're getting sick or when you are sick. I do that. Okay. I'll do that. So what can we look at in here, especially that kind of speaks to your particular food ways? Well, so I don't know that I'm growing so many things that are like traditional foods, except I do have okra, but it's hard for me to get enough okra to actually do anything with. But I do, you know, I harvest my little like 10 pods at a time and I roasted or something like that. And I have a little bit, I don't know if we have any left, but I have a little bit of the field piece.

They're getting, they're kind of kind of, everything is getting, you know, kind of old. There's one, there's a bunch around. There's some pods down there. Yeah. This one I actually grew so that it would be supported by the okra plant. Oh, yeah, I do that too. So I have a few kinds of hot peppers that I really like. One of them I got from the Hansbury Garden, one of the volunteers there then.

But the things that I use the absolute most are the herbs. So time, actually some of this time came from Kristen Owen's front yard. Yeah, because my time, like my time, which, you know, like you usually. is so hardy. This was the year before last. It just didn't come back and I was walking by and there was this time plant on the porch. It's like, I'll take a piece of this and see if it'll root and sure enough. It looks great. Yeah. The lemon bomb, which I use a little bit, but mostly I just have an ornamental. And the rosemary, I put rocks around it to try to make it a little bit of a warmer environment. And so last year it came back. We'll see if it comes back next year.

and the chives that come back pretty reliably. And so this is oregano that it's a little, it's more tender, so it's already dying back. But it comes every year, and I was able to dry some. Yeah, and the parsley, I actually planted from seed. Some years I plant things from seed. Like I have, in past years, grown parsley, you know, that was great. Then sometimes it's just like I can't even get, a seed to come up. But I planted this in the late summer, I guess. We use a lot of parsley in my

house and we use a lot of time in my house. I don't remember really growing up having, like we didn't have a whole lot of like herbs or something. We certainly didn't have fresh herbs, but even dried herbs. It was like, you know, there was oregano and, you know, used the spaghetti sauce and stuff like that. But when I started working in restaurants, it was making a recipe or something that used a dry time. And I remember opening the jar of time, it was like, it totally took me back home, but I didn't know why. I mean, and to this day, I don't know why, because it's not, I don't remember ever having that at home, but we must have, my father must have used it.

And so now that I know, like in the Caribbean and in West Africa, time is such an important herb, a culinary herb, it's like, okay, so there must have been some connection there. but um in the blood yeah my my friend beth who i used to um i worked for it she's another chef and she's like yeah if it doesn't have time and if Valerie didn't make it it's like what can what can i say i agree yeah we use time every day i use time almost in almost anything and you talk up there talking so much about field peas is giving me what we're going to have tomorrow night oh yeah so we're going to have some hop and john of some sort but definitely time goes in everything that I made. Yeah. And I, so I many, many, many years ago did a meal with Edna Lewis. And I know

if you all know Edna Lewis, yeah, who is a really renowned black chef. And anyway, but in one of her books, she talks about using dry time because she thinks it has a lot stronger flavor that she finds fresh time and sip it a lot of times. And so the same things. Like I, even when I have time growing in my garden, I will buy dry time. Or, you know, if I have enough, I might dry my own. And if I use fresh time and something, I often will use dry time, too, to kind of, like, you know, bump up the flavor a little bit. I will say, though, before I met Owen at the seed swap, I only thought of seeds as the things that you get in packets. And, I mean, like, and, you know, I had grown things from seed, you know, in previous years, but not a lot, not a lot of stuff,

but, you know, like tomatoes or cucumbers or something like that. I had grown from seed, but I never thought of saving seed. And now I'm like some, like, seed thief. I walk around the street and see a plant that's, you know, where the flower has already gone to seed. It's like, oh, just take some of that. Yeah, see if something you'll grow. the plant wants yeah exactly what what seeds now that you're what you call a seed thief what seeds have you successfully saved and actually gotten crops from in your garden oh they're kind of

peeked looking now but over in the strip i have a couple of fish peppers they were not they were not um seeds that i teafed but um but i yeah but they actually came from a seed swap and I grew them from seed which I find amazing because it's so hard to you know in this climate to get you know like unless you have a greenhouse which I don't have to try to get peppers from from seed to fruit but I'm I am very happy with them and the reason I those are still on the plant is because I want to save the seeds yeah this one right here particularly is just gorgeous look at that that's a show-offy kind of pepper yeah it could this is like variegated. When I go to transplant them, I haven't labeled them as well as I thought.

But these, because they have variegated leaves, I could tell what they were. We did a whole episode on the fish pepper, but I'm wondering if you could tell people what you know about this special pepper. So all I know, I think it's, is it from Chester County? I think it's, and I think this is the pepper that the Weaver family got from Horace Pippen. So that's that's really all I know about it. you know the funny thing is my father would put hot peppers on things and also he would put hot peppers in jars of vinegar everybody that I know who who is from a place where you have hot peppers has like pepper vinegar on the table yep is that the plan with these probably if I had more of them like one year I got a bunch of hot peppers from the wick farm and I probably

could do that again I'm just not down there but I got and I made hot sauce we have a friend April, April McGregor, who's a master ferventer, and I, like, texted it's like, how do I make hot sauce? And so she saw it was a fermented hot sauce. And it was really good, but it was so hot. And I have another friend who made hot sauce, and I said, how did you make the hot sauce so it wasn't so hot? Because I knew she was using, like, Scotchbonnet.

She said, I put red bell pepper in it. Yes. And I'm like, what a good idea. I would have thought of that eventually, wouldn't I have? Yeah, we mixed ours with sweet peppers. when we make our pepper sauce, too. It's interesting you were talking about that pepper vinegar. I also grew up with pepper vinegar on the table, everywhere in the salad.

I'm not a huge fan of it. I prefer a pepper sauce, you know. I was really surprised to see that, you know, when we start talking about what's shared throughout the African world, that in Puerto Rico, they also make a pepper vinegar that they keep on the table, a pique, I believe it's right? I think every place does it. I did not really know it. I mean, especially if you're in the top. Like, I feel like here, like, obviously you can grow peppers, but in the tropics, where, you know, it's really prolific.

And also, they're not going to keep that long, you know. It's going to be harder to dry because it's moisture. So something, you know, so you make sauce out or you make vinegar out, and then you can keep that crop for a lot, a lot longer. That's actually how we make our sauces first put them in vinegar until we're ready to make the sauce. And then we make the sauce out of the pepper vinegar and other stuff. prefer it like that in the sauce. But I also imagine, though, that I've never seen pepper vinegar go bad, but I have seen hot sauce, you know, get fermented, which apparently is popular now, fermented hot sauce. I'm like, y'all just lazy. You let your hot sauce go bad. Well, the thing

is, you can ferment it, but it'll keep fermenting. So you either have to refrigerate it or heated to stop the ferment at the time that you that you want. My earliest memories with you, Ms. Val, were you coming and working with my students at Martin Luther King High School. And you will come every year and do a few hours long cooking class with them and show them how to make biscuits and do stuff with Okra and eat their traditional foods, which I pray made a mark on them. And I do that work now, not just with young people, Now, for me, it's probably more specific. We have a youth program, but I work largely with the elders and young adults.

But I'm just wondering, what are your hopes for particularly black Philadelphians who have this deep heritage that many of them don't know about or don't emphasize? Like, what would you like to see happen in terms of the preservation of food ways or culture just in general? Well, I mean, look at my block, and I'm practically the only person. person that grows anything even anything ornamental you know word up to me we'd get rid of lawns lawns are useless and so I mean I wish more people just had felt a connection to even just a little bit of ground in front of their house like it doesn't you know you don't need a farm you don't you know I mean it's great if you have one but just the idea that you can you can grow something and have it be beautiful and

something that you can look at. I don't know. I would really want that. And this is a little bit farther afield, but I think a lot about environmental apartheid, and that's where I think about things like, you know, where is their shade? Where are their trees? So traditionally, that street, Wayne Avenue, was a dividing line. This was a black part of Germantown. And just a few blocks, this few blocks. And this was a, you know, obviously was a middle-class block because, you know, look at it. But when you look across that street, you can see that it's a tree-lined street. So this end of Penn was the black end? Yeah, right on this side of Wayne Avenue. And, and that's why the housing projects were

up at that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, so I look, it's like, well why don't we why don't we have more trees why don't we have more trees in the city and it's not and it's real it's it's not about the size of the street and it's not about the um how much sun and all any of those things because obviously you can have a tree line street yeah but but we we don't and uh you know that's like and even when like if you go to a residential neighborhood the amount of tree cover is one of the main markers of a well-to-do street. And I would like people as individuals to be able to plant more things and to grow more things for themselves,

but also I would like us as a society to take on that work and not only leave it to the individual. Right. Yeah. Well, I agree. Thank you so much for taking your whole morning with us to share your stories. with everybody. Very welcome. And let me go get the Kalaloo for you because I froze it right after the party

and I gave part of it to Vivine and the other part I was bringing up to your house every day. But apparently I never got there. Thank you, Miss Valerie Irwin. Thank you also to Alyssa Fredine of Scrib Video Center and WP. West Philly's community radio for helping with editing suggestions and getting our show on the radio on Thursday afternoons in West Philly and online. And thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and their people with your loved ones. Please share this episode with someone you love and subscribe to our show in your favorite podcast app.

Thank you also for helping our seedkeeping and storytelling work by leaving us a review and also ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more for my website. true loveseeds.com and again if you'd like to support our podcast for one dollar or more monthly please join our patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds and remember keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future god bless