The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bryant Terry “Blackifies” Fennel, and Ian Frazier Says Goodbye to 2020, in Verse

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

Bryant Terry is a chef, educator, food-justice activist, and cookbook author. He joined Helen Rosner virtually to cook a dish from his recent book, “Vegetable Kingdom”: citrus and garlic-herb braised fennel. The dish calls for marinating the bulb in mojo, a citrus-juice-based Cuban condiment more typically paired with meat. Terry says that he wants to “Blackify” fennel, as part of his project to “uplift” Black culinary traditions from the global African diaspora. Plus, Ian Frazier reads a poem written for the 2020 holiday season. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Helen Rosner is a staff writer and a food expert for The New Yorker. And one of her favorite things to do is to get together with another pro, another writer or a chef, and find some new things to cook. Now, that, of course, is getting a little more complicated now. Okay, I'm going to get up. I'm Helen Rosner. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker. and I am standing in my Brooklyn kitchen right now

in front of a cutting board with a pile of fennel, parsley, vinegar, a couple of bags of plantain chips. There's a lot of really cool, interesting stuff here in front of me, and the most important thing in front of me is my phone, which is currently in the middle of a FaceTime call with the chef Bryant Terry. Hey, Helen. Hey, how's it going?

The author of the cookbook, Vegetable Kingdom, which came out this year, and which is one of my favorite books of the year. And we're going to make a recipe for, in the book, it's citrus and garlic herb-raised fennel. And Bryant is in his kitchen in Oakland, California. Hey, Bryant. Hey, Helen. I'm here in my backyard in Oakland, ready to cook.

Citrus. I don't know. Tell me what goes into this recipe. It looks like there's a couple of different parts here. Yeah. So the cornerstone of the recipe is actually the moho, which is a kind of citrus and garlic condiments. or marinade that's using Cuban cooking, oftentimes to marinate meat. And I thought that it would be fun to take fennel bulbs and give them a nice sear to give them

some color and a little crisp on the outside and then baste them in this moho in a similar way that one might baste a turkey. Cool. So we should do that part first, right? We should make the sauce. So yeah, the sauce should be made first because you want to let it rest for an hour. that the flavors can concentrate and marry and that's going to set you up. And I bet that really makes the garlic just get super garlicy too, right?

Just like a garlic explosion. You had a garlic explosion. I'm going to just start measuring out the orange juice and the lime juice and stuff while you talk to me about the recipe, okay? Okay, cool. So you've been doing this stuff for a long time. Have you always known that you were going to be a cookbook? author, how did you come to this? You know, I didn't. I thought I was going to be a professor. And when I was a

grad student at NYU, I started doing more research on the Black Panther Party and their survival programs. And I think they were so cutting edge in their analysis and understanding this intersection of poverty, malnutrition, and institutional racism back in the late 60s. So their grocery giveaways and their free breakfast for children program really excited me to do my part in creating a more healthy and sustainable food system. Do you mind if I give you some cooking tips? Yeah, no, tell me what to do. Okay.

When you're working with citrus, a lot of people don't realize that you can actually get a lot more juice from your orange, lime, lemon. If you actually take the fruit and then roll it with the palm of your hand back and forth for about 15 to 20 seconds because that starts to break down the constitution of it. And so you'll get more, it'll yield more juice. And a thing that I learned the hard way early in my cooking life is that if you're going to zest something and juice something, you always need to zest it first. Yes, that's a great point.

You definitely want to zest it first. You know, Brian, while you were talking just now, I was using your rolling out the citrus technique on some of the limes that I was about to juice. Hold on. I'm going to try this again. It was amazing. It was like Niagara Falls coming out of this lime. Yes, that's crazy.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. You've changed the game for me. This is amazing. It works well. All right, let's do the fennel. So we talked a little bit about fennel, but I was so struck by one of the phrases that you use to describe your approach to fennel.

You talk about blackifying it and that you want to bring to food, like this sense of your blackness and the blackness of the context of your call. culture and use this like very beautiful phrase, your blood and spiritual ancestors, which I think is such a moving way of talking about like the communities that we arise from. Has it always been kind of a conscious choice for you to to blackify food? I feel like more than blackifying it, my approach has been about uplifting black food. And, you know, that started when I was in culinary school. I was just really, I won't say put off, but it was disappointing that there was such an emphasis on classical French and classical Italian techniques. And one of the things I feel like I've been fighting since I started this work is pushing back against the kind of reductive ways in which people imagine, think about, talk about black food.

And I think so often when people think about black food, what they're thinking about are two different things. and sometimes they're kind of playing with each other. But one is antebellum survival food. I can tell you how many times I've heard people kind of like vilify African American cuisine and kind of reducing it to what they call slave food. You know, whatever the plantation owners didn't want, the scraps, the remnants of, you know, the vegetables or the animal visceral, whatever it is. Like that's the stuff that was discarded and we just had to like eat it and make do.

Why would we want to eat that? So there is that line of thinking. And then the other one is people reduce African American cuisine to soul food, which in my mind are the kind of big flavored meats and, you know, fatty desserts and overcooked vegetables that you might find at, you know, soul food restaurants. But in terms of like the kind of core, the traditional staples of African American cuisine, we're talking about things like black eyed peas, sugar snap peas, pole beans, lima beans, you know, You know, dark leafy greens like collards, mousards, turnips, kale, dandelions. And so one of my major projects has been kind of helping people reimagine black food in all its diversity and complexity. And how does this connect to the fact that your recipes are vegan and that the cooking that you're doing is plant-based? Does that come from a similar politics?

Yeah, well, you know, in terms of the way that most people imagine veganism, they're either, thinking about like upper middle class white suburbanites or kind of like young white hipsters who are living in, you know, urban centers, right? Like veganism is like an aesthetic rather than a politic. It's an aesthetic. It's something that white people own. And I think it's important that people understand that there's a history of black food and health-led activism throughout the 20th century.

And my first contact with the idea of vegetarianism came from black seven-day Adventist. And then after I read Malcolm X and was obsessed with the nation of Islam, I learned about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his health ministry. He wrote two books, How to Eat to Live, which was his way of helping black folks think about eating more healthfully. You know, I think about Dick Gregory, the comedian and social justice activists and his emphasis on food. I mean, the thing that politicized me was a hip-hop song about factory farming called

Beef by the rapper KRS One from the group Buggy Down Production. Beef. When will this poisonous product cease? This is another public service announcement. You can believe it or you can doubt it. Let us begin now with the cow. The way it gets to your plate and how. And so, you know, black people are suffering from the highest rates of preventable

diet-related illnesses. Heart disease, hypertension, type two diabetes. I would argue that we needn't look any further than our own cultural cuisine in order to find better health. I love that. So you have all your vinegars, your, your, your, your, your, your, citrus in there? Yep, all my citrus is in there. I think it's garlic time. Could I use like a microplane or graded or something like that? You know, you could. I've never. You're allowed to say no,

you know, I think that was a tone of voice that implied to me that you think it's a bad idea. No, I just hadn't thought about it, but. And you're going to let that intensify while everything else happens. I love, I love fennel. I'm like super obsessed with fennel. And I don't really love black licorish, I just want to take a bite out of it. It's so good. Let me do that too. I don't even know if I've ever even attempted to take like a full on. This is kind of like an apple bite.

Oh. I'm going to do this in Berkeley and they're going to think I'm a god. I'm going to start me a cult, the cult of eating fennel raw. So in Vegetable Kingdom, you assign a track to each recipe. Each recipe has a song, and you've got this gorgeous playlist at the beginning of the book that puts them all together. And the song that goes with this recipe is AfroQ, parentheses, Bambay, by Mongo Santa Maria from the album. What do you mean? So what is it about this song that you particularly like?

Just the African rhythms. If I close my eyes, I just feel like I'm being transported back to New Orleans. to Havana, to Lagos. It's all about the African rhythms. What a pan should I use for this? You're good to go. That cast on a skillet is exactly where you want to be. So I'm gonna...

Oh yeah. You hear that sizzle? Okay, so I've formed this awesome skillet. I have nestled beautifully in my golden pieces of fennel. And now we're gonna let them braze. This is where the magic happens, right? Alright, let's take it right. Oh my god. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I'm obviously over here thinking that this is the bomb. What do you think? This is the bomb. This is totally the bomb. That is the technical term, I think, for the dish. Brian Terry talking with the New Yorker's Helen Rosner. Now, full disclosure, we skipped quite a few steps as Helen was making that dish,

and you may have suspected as much. But if you want to try Brian Terry's brazed fennel in that amazing citrus moho, you can find the recipe at New York. Yorker Radio.org. It comes from his book, Vegetable Kingdom, which came out earlier this year. Every year since 1932, not every year, but close. The New Yorker has published a poem called Greetings Friends. He comes out around Christmas, and it's a way of recalling the people and the events of the outgoing year. Staff writer Ian Frazier has been writing the annual Greetings Friends since 2012. Here's Ian.

Friends, one and all. Let us unmute, excite the timbrel and the lute, make merry with our pots and pan, the hour is seven so we can, shout from the balcony or lawn for joy at what will soon be gone, and praises sing for what is here, the end to this undreamt of year. Commune with us, dear friends, while we strew gifts abundant round the tree, and help us pick out something nice for New York's Dr. David, Price, the Bronx's Dr. Ernest Patty, every nurse in Cincinnati, Dr. L. Woodward of You Miss, Dr. Pernell, she's our own Chris. L.A.'s Dr. Anna Darby, Arizona's Dr. Barbie.

Harold Varmus, the Nobeler, Doc of Reputation Stellar. Ashley Bartholomew, R.N. And when we check the list again, it unscrolls out across the floor. with health care stalwarts by the score. By the millions. Heroes true. And lose their student loan deaths, do. As we replay 2-0 in slow-mo, a Christmas cheer for Andrew Cuomo is not a miss,

nor would it be for bat virologist Xi Zhang Li, stake Diane, the cool maskmaker, Dolly Parton, Peter Baker, Jennifer O'Malley Dylan, Issa Ray, Calvin Bud Trillin, Stacey Abrams, Mikey Sheryl, Andrew Ray, and Colin Farrell. The passing comet Neo-Wise, which, lacking hands, can't sanitize them, yearns to be the wise men's star instead,

and shining from afar lays tender beams on A. Blinkin, Dr. Fauci, and, we're thinking, too, on David Milliband, Allalia Bundles, Michael Land, Gretchen Whitmer Fearless Gov, John Ossoff, who were so fond of, Chris Krebs and Tyler the creator. Brightly and not one bit later, it shines on Amy Westervelt, whose podcast we have always felt is great. On Alice Oswald, too, and similarly on a few deserving folks like James McBride, Fern Finkel, Brooklyn's courtroom pride, Reed's singer, Mr. Brokaw, Tom, Meg Knox, and wondrous Rosa Baum.

Yay, for Jack and Marta Handy, and our old pal Peter Canby. A super surge of Christmas glee to Joe and Jill from me and thee, and all good things to Kamala and Doug, from us and Mamala. This year, just in case you wondered, Roger Angel turned a hundred, An unequaled master of this rhyme from back when it was in its prime, he rocks. And so does Peggy Mormon, who is the best, and that's for sure, man. To those who lift us up, God's speed, we hope Josh Gad has all he'll need. For Alexander Vinderman and Bro Yevganey weave a plan to wish them both benignity,

and with no loss of dignity, shout Season's blessings to Jack Black, Mystery writer Stephen Womack, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, David Chichester, Chris Cooper, with, by the by, a friendly high to VP Pence's pensive fly. Should Christmas comfort be deployed? May it descend on Terrence Floyd.

Philonis Floyd and their relations. Rev. Al, thanks for your oration. May peace, what a bit of you. ever peace there be, enfold the family arboree. May justice come to all who thirst and hunger for it through the worst. Dear friends, if we could rhyme away the year's vast losses, we might say these stumbling lines were justified as right in step with Christmas tide. Does meter link up hope and history? The only rhyme word here is mystery. Let gladness rise, despite, despite.

Love one another routes the night, and kindness is a folding chair we carry with us everywhere. In depth of winter, prospects brighten. Mighty streams of light will lighten the miles ahead and goodness rain once more. The Angel's Grand Refrain. Ian Frazier. You can read Greetings Friends at New Yorker.com.

I'm David Remnick. That's our show for today. And if you're celebrating Christmas, I hope you have an absolutely merry one despite it all. We'll be back with you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Lave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Callaliyah, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mung-Fa-Chene and Emily Mann. Additional help this week from Julie Conquest. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.