The Publishing World Is Finally Embracing Black Cookbooks

An industry-wide reckoning last summer led to growing publisher interest in books about the African diaspora and its foodways. But Black authors, editors, and booksellers have long been doing the work.

The past year has seen the release of Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook, by food historian Michael Twitty, Gullah Geechee cookbook Bress ‘n’ Nyam by Matthew Raiford, and Everyone’s Table by chef Gregory Gourdet, co-authored by JJ Goode. In September, Life Is What You Bake It, a baking cookbook by Great American Baking Show winner Vallery Lomas was released, and October brought Bryant Terry’s book, Black Food, from his new imprint with Ten Speed Press, 4 Color Books. Terry aims to use the imprint to make space for other BIPOC chefs, writers, artists, and activists to publish nonfiction work.

It may seem like a boon, but this steady stream of published cookbooks written by Black authors is really a course correction. Until recently, Black cookbook authors have been largely overlooked by major publishers: During a discussion of Malinda Russell, now regarded as the first Black cookbook author, Jemima Code author Toni Tipton-Martin said of the way white institutions treat Black contributions, “We function within a system that knows how to continue to exist the way it always did, by promoting the few [Black people] and continuing the marginalization.”

That underrepresentation reflects a lack of diversity within the publishing industry that runs deeper than Tipton-Martin names, extending to those deciding which texts to publish in the first place and editing them. Between 1950 and 2018, 95 percent of the books published by major publishing houses, like Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, were written by white authors, according to a New York Times op-ed by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek. Although it’s possible to publish a book through other avenues, having the financial backing and support of a major publisher helps to ensure that books land in front of a larger audience. Unsurprisingly, by 2020, the same data shows that only 10 percent of the books on the New York Times best-seller list were authored by people of color.

Last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor seemed to shift perceptions of people in positions of power, or so they publicly claimed. Throughout the summer, many industries came under fire for their histories of racism and exclusivity, food media and publishing included; many book publishers have since pledged to both diversify their staff and publish more BIPOC authors.

While publishers may now say they’re committed to highlighting the influence of the African diaspora and its foodways, Black folks have long championed and celebrated its food literature. And as the momentum surrounding these books continues to grow, those who have already been doing the work are facing a pivotal moment.

As a cookbook author himself, Terry knows exactly how difficult it can be for Black cookbook authors to get their work published. After the critical success of his first book, 2006’s Grub, which was co-authored by his friend and colleague Anna Lappé, he thought he would “just walk into a fantastic deal for Vegan Soul Kitchen,” his second book, which was ultimately published in 2009.

“My agent and I shopped it around to about a dozen publishers and 10 of them said flat-out no,” Terry says. Typically, the response to his proposal was incredulousness about whether or not Black vegans really even existed, and skepticism that there would be enough interest among Black folks for the book to sell — this despite the fact that, according to Terry, “African Americans are the fastest-growing population of vegans in the United States.”

Without Black employees among the decision-making ranks of major houses, publishers may struggle to recognize the insights and perspectives that Black authors have to contribute. “We’re not only clear about what the zeitgeist of the moment is,” Terry says of Black cookbook authors, “we have an idea of what the emerging zeitgeist is going to be.”

Terry’s new imprint, 4 Color Books, will demonstrate what it means to stay abreast of the zeitgeist. Imprints operate as a distinct brand within a larger publishing organization, and 4 Color Books draws inspiration from the model of independent hip-hop labels like Def Jam and Tommy Boy, which had the financial backing of major labels and distributors but, as Terry puts it, “understood the internal logic of hip-hop and their audience.” At 4 Color, BIPOC creators will have creative control to implement their vision with the support of a publishing team, including editors and food stylists, that trusts the author’s understanding of their audience, all while having the resources of the largest global publisher, Penguin Random House.

Black folks are playing a prominent role not just in publishing, but also in getting those published works in the hands of readers. “[Black food literature] is getting a lot of attention now but really has such deep and important roots,” says Danielle Davenport, who launched online bookstore BEM with her sister Gabrielle Davenport in January 2020. BEM specifically highlights Black-authored cookbooks from around the diaspora, as well as Black-authored literature with significant food references, like Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.

Food and literature have always been touchstones for the Davenport sisters. “We’re big fans of bookstores and what they represent and how they operate in their communities,” says Gabrielle Davenport. Although there are Black bookstores across the country and bookstores that focus solely on food literature, the sisters hadn’t come across a store that was both Black and food-focused. They plan to open a physical store in Brooklyn by the end of this year where they will continue to shine a light on more current works, but also on older and lesser-known texts. “There’s a list of books that are out of print or aren’t carried by the distributor that we work with that we hope to carry in the brick-and-mortar space as we excavate the physical copies that do exist,” says Gabrielle Davenport.

Bookstores like BEM, whose customers are actively interested in engaging with Black food literature, are vital to the cultural preservation of diasporic food contributions. “There’s a lot of juicy conversation to be had about how [historical texts] functioned then and how we might think about them now,” says Danielle Davenport.

Ozoz Sokoh, a Nigerian culinary anthropologist and historian, also recognizes the value of curating and celebrating these works. Sokoh, who now lives in Canada, was born and raised in Nigeria for the better part of her childhood. After moving abroad, she says she began to “realize the strong connections that existed between Indigenous West African food culture and its diaspora.” Last summer she was given a copy of The Jemima Code, a seminal tome on African-American cookbooks written by Tipton-Martin, and when she began to look through the extended bibliography, she realized what a wealth of resources it contained.

In October 2020, Sokoh launched Feast Afrique, an online archive, which she describes as “a collection of thoughts, words, and ideas relevant to West African and diasporic food contributions.” Feast Afrique includes a digital library where Sokoh has compiled over 240 books, including those referenced in The Jemima Code.

Sokoh, who was surprised to discover that an archive like Feast Afrique did not already exist, felt this was a way that she could use food literature to bring Black folks across the diaspora together. “I realized that if I, who had a strong interest in food, was coming to these realizations so late, then those with a cursory interest in food would be hard-pressed to come across this information,” she says. “I really wanted to put it all together in a space where everyone — Nigerians, Brazilians, Black people — could access it and see the connections and hopefully to bring a sense of shared history and shared experiences.”

As the appetite for cookbooks and food literature from Black authors continues to grow, curators and archivists like Sokoh, bookstores like BEM, and publishing entities like 4 Color Books will be increasingly important. It’s invaluable to have Black people curating and stewarding that content. “Our sense of preservation and culture has always been important,” says Sokoh. “Three-hundred years ago we weren’t allowed to read and write or document and still our culture, history, and recipes were sustained by word-of-mouth. It’s important that we tell our own stories and are in control of our own stories.”

As Terry’s earlier experiences in publishing highlight, Black editors, literary scouts, and publicists provide necessary cultural competency when it comes to the work of Black authors. At BEM, the Davenport sisters feel there are nuances in the works they come across that they as Black women are more attuned to. “There are certain things I feel sure that we’re picking up on that perhaps a non-Black person, who’s interested in the work and the food, may miss,” says Danielle Davenport. “Having context and personal experience with what you’re putting forth is invaluable.”

One can only hope that after neglecting the culinary contributions of the African diaspora for so long, the current wave of Black-authored cookbooks represents a marked, long-lasting change within the cookbook publishing industry. But regardless of what’s to come, Black folks working in the food space will undoubtedly continue to celebrate the contributions to the culinary world that have already been made, and the countless ones to come.

Nicole Rufus is a food writer, recipe developer, and grad student in Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
Camilla Sucre is a Caribbean American artist from Trinidad, born in New York and raised in Baltimore.

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Rotisserie Chicken Is the Best Home-Cooked Meal You Don’t Actually Have to Cook

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It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s better than anything I ever cook when I really don’t want to cook

A few weeks ago, when the Dominican counter service restaurant a few blocks from my Brooklyn apartment closed with no notice and no explanation, I had what I can only describe as an existential crisis. The thing is, for the better part of this year, I subsisted off of the rotisserie chicken at El Rincon de Macon. I’d cooked furiously during the first leg of the pandemic while I was living with my parents in California, and when I came back to New York, I honestly didn’t have a lot of steam left. So regular stops at El Rincon became a ritual for me. I might not have the energy to grocery shop or dry-brine meat or gingerly wash leaves of lettuce, but I always have the oomph to walk 15 minutes down Nostrand Avenue, toward the glowing light of El Rincon’s big neon sign.

My order was pretty much always the same: a whole chicken, a helping of plantains, cooked to hell under the heat lamp, and on days when I was too lazy to even turn on the rice cooker, a big deli container of lovely, oil-coated rice. The chicken was always perfect, slathered in an herby coating of oregano and garlic and more salt than most home cooks are brave enough to use. The dark meat was juicy and falling off the bone, and the white meat was slightly stringy in a way that I always find quite pleasing — especially when I’m not responsible for the “overcooking.” In the summer it was the easy meal I needed before going out for a long night. And at the start of winter, it was warm and comforting — and extremely cheap.

When the lights went out at El Rincon I realized just how much I’d come to rely on a $12 chicken, so much so that on my very sad walk home that night, I had quite literally no idea what I was going to eat for dinner. I still love to cook, and when I have someone else to cook for, it brings me just as much joy and satisfaction as it always has. But when I’m just feeding myself, a rotisserie chicken brings the warmth of a home-cooked meal — and technically, it makes three home-cooked meals. It is easy, it is cheap, and it is better than anything I ever cook when I really don’t want to cook.

This winter (even if you live somewhere that never actually gets cold), I suggest finding your local rotisserie chicken joint, and incorporating that perfect bird into your “cooking” repertoire. I buy a whole chicken for date nights, easy lunches, and quick after-gym meals. Served whole, it’s as impressive as — and probably tastier than — the best home-cooked bird, and when you get down to the carcass and last scraps, it’s the ideal mix-in for pastas, sandwiches, and just eating cold, off the bone, to nurse a truly offensive hangover.

In the absence of my trusty El Rincon rotisserie chicken, I ate some admittedly weird struggle meals. There was a lot of pasta with frozen peas and jarred pesto. And plenty of canned tuna in places where tuna really does not belong. I am a food writer, yes, but I am an early-twenties “adult” in New York first.

So a few days ago, when I noticed the light above El Rincon had flickered back on, I quite literally squealed with joy. It was the relief of knowing that the easiest and cheapest meal in my rotation was available again, but also the contentment of knowing that I can enjoy my favorite home-cooked meal that I don’t actually have to cook.

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Blood, Salt-Cured Fish, and Custard: An Illustrated Guide to Some of Philly’s Favorite Ingredients

Fabiola Lara

https://philly.eater.com/22820326/guide-to-universal-ingredients-philly-vietnamese-colombian-elkins-park-northeast

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How Two-Michelin-Starred Californios Honors Mexican Cuisine

Val Cantu and his team of star chefs honor traditional Mexican fare while maintaining their creative vision at the San Francisco restaurant

“When I was cooking in fine dining, there was almost no one cooking with Mexican ingredients and treating them with the respect I thought they deserved,” says Californios chef and owner Val Cantu. “I thought [Mexican food] was just as worthy of treating with care and respect as any other cuisine.” Thanks to this attitude — and Cantu and his team’s dedication to honoring Mexican flavors, ingredients, and cooking techniques — the San Francisco restaurant has maintained its two Michelin star status in the tire company’s California guide this year.

It all starts with fresh corn. Cantu likens the importance of his corn to that of quality sushi rice in a Japanese restaurant. “Corn is an amazing, delicious, and healthful ingredient that has become abused, over-farmed, and genetically modified to not a good place,” he says. “The goal of the restaurant is to preserve ... the vegetables that could be lost if no one is serving them.” Cantu’s chefs prep the corn for the nixtamalization process, which unlocks the vegetable’s nutrients, and prepares it for house-made masa designated for the tortillas in Californios’s taco course.

While the restaurant’s tacos pay homage to Mexican cuisine from various regions, Cantu and his team of star chefs also pride themselves on their inventiveness in the kitchen. “I really try to encourage and mentor a lot of my chefs on research and development, and creating,” Cantu says. “Creativity is something that’s like an exercise, you have to exercise it, you have to practice it, you have to work on it.” Cantu’s team flexes their creative muscles in dishes like puffed pieces of black masa topped with sea urchin, squab arabe tacos marinated in Lebanese spices, and grilled banana in savory dulce de leche sauce served with a dollop of caviar.

“We haven’t been traveling a lot, I haven’t been to Mexico as regularly as I have been,” says Cantu. “So really I miss those flavors, and a lot of the current menu right now is just flavor memories that we miss from traveling.”

See more of what the Californios team creates by watching the video above.

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You Can Rent the Many Graphic Tees Worn by Antoni on ‘Queer Eye’ for Charity

They’re all wearing t-shirts but only one of them is really wearing a t-shirt. | Wardrobe

So many band shirts to choose from, and it’s all to benefit LGBTQ education nonprofit GLSEN

Think of any iconic celebrity-worn outfit you’d die to wear for a day. J.Lo’s Versace gown? Bjork’s swan dress? If you answer was “one of Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski’s Strokes T-shirts,” maybe dream bigger, but also you’re in luck. The chef-actor-author-model-avocado influencer has partnered with Wardrobe, a “peer rental fashion platform,” to rent out clothing from his own closet to benefit LGBTQ education charity GLSEN.

Wardrobe says Porowski is renting out almost 50 clothing items, though right now there are fewer than 20 on the site. Those currently available, however, include some Strokes, Arcade Fire, and The National T-shirts, a striped shirt he wore next to Justin Trudeau during Montreal Pride in 2018, the Comme des Garçons shirt and Gucci boots he wore in Taylor Swift’s “You Need To Calm Down” music video, and a moto jacket designed by James Concannon that he wore on the show and is also now featured on a LEGO. Unfortunately, none of his sweatbands or saucy neckerchiefs have yet to appear.

It’s one of those partnerships that is like, sure, okay. This makes sense, not in the way that nonprofits should be funded by celebrity clothing rentals, but that it was just a matter of time in our “your brand is you” economy before famous people would rent you a used T-shirt for $22. Antoni has good taste in T-shirts and jackets, and he’s not shilling for Uber Eats, and by all accounts his pierogies are great, and that, plus trying to do some good for LGBTQ students, is about as much as we can expect from anyone. But as an important note, if you want to own it for more than four days, you can always buy that James Dean Speed Queen shirt, and send a donation to GLSEN while you’re at it.

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How Picking Piñon Nuts in New Mexico Became Big Business

The painstaking process of picking piñon nuts makes for a booming roadside economy for the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous Americans

Ellis Tanner started his business, the Ellis Tanner Trading Company, in Gallup, New Mexico, more than 50 years ago — the seemingly natural outcome of growing up among four generations of Native American art traders. His gallery walls are decorated with murals of prominent Navajos within the community, and lining the space are glass cases of Native American jewelry and crafts. But there’s one other, more ephemeral portion of the business that makes Tanner’s eyes light up, even after half a century of experience with it: buying and selling tiny, dark-as-earth piñon nuts. “I have made and lost a lot of money trading piñon,” he says.

Tanner’s gallery is located on Highway 602, just north of what is locally known as the Checkerboard. The land bordering the winding highway looks sparse, and is dotted with thickets of forest-green piñon pines and gnarled cedars. But once the curves of the road calm, it opens into breathtaking downhill vistas of rocky bluffs en route towards the Zuni Pueblo. Up close, the trees multiply and resemble, in their own high-desert kind of way, a lush canopy.

Gallup, New Mexico is part of a patchwork of land known as the Checkerboard.

Parcels of land in the Checkerboard are, as the name might imply, mixed — there is tribal-owned, state-owned, or privately owned land in close proximity to each other. “Checkerboarding” dates to the mid 1800s, when Navajos were forced onto reservation lands and assigned individual plots for subsistence farming, while other parcels were sold to railroad companies and private citizens. If you take a few steps in any direction today, you may end up on property that is in an entirely different jurisdiction than where you started. Pragmatically, the land designation is a challenge — getting the proper permits for construction or utility installation quickly becomes complicated. But one perk of the land in this particular area, one that makes it so very valuable to locals who visit it in the summer, is the wealth of bushy piñon trees.

Piñon pine trees are indigenous to the high desert of the Southwest and produce nuts that are simply called piñon. The small, dark brown nuts ripen and fall from the pines each summer and autumn across the intersection of the Four Corners states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. To eat them, you must crack the shell of the piñon between your canine teeth, peel open the shell, and pull out the pale meat within the nut. The process is similar to munching sunflower seeds or pistachios, except that the shell can’t be mechanically loosened ahead of time for easy snacking — the hard exterior must always be cracked and shucked by hand. Though piñon closely resemble pine nuts to the untrained eye and palate, a local around Gallup will quickly correct you. “Pine nuts are big and bland,” Tanner says. “Piñon are small and sweet.”

The area around Gallup — which occupies the unceded traditional homelands of the Zuni, Pueblo, and Diné Bikéyah and other Indigenous tribes — isn’t the only place where piñon can be harvested. The trees also grow in western California, veer east across New Mexico to northern Texas, range north across southwest Colorado and even pop up in Wyoming — but in New Mexico, the culture of foraging for piñon is particularly deep-seated because of the sheer abundance. For centuries, Mescalero Apaches, Navajos, and Puebloan communities, among others across the Southwest, relied on piñon as a staple source of fat and calories. They also steeped the pine needles for tea and chewed the inner bark to ward off starvation in lean times. The wood of the piñon tree is still burned today as a form of incense and is a favorite souvenir from a visit to New Mexico.

During boom years of piñon drop, late-summer Gallup transforms into a massive center for piñon commerce. Gigantic signs outside of gas stations, restaurants, and trading posts advertise that they are buying piñon. Vans toting brokers from outside of the region park along Highway 602 and set up tables and chairs with their own handmade signs: “BUYING PINON.” And, depending on the year and the yield, strings of cars will be parked along highways, National Forest roads, or within rural communities with dense vegetation, their passengers flocking to bursting piñon trees with their families. People lay blankets on the ground and sift through the ripened nuts that have fallen from sticky pine cones, as part of this tradition-turned-robust seasonal economy for many New Mexicans.

Piñon dealer Ellis tanner is a fourth generation Native American art trader in New Mexico.

During boom seasons, roadsigns in this part of New Mexico advertise the buying and selling of piñon.

“As far as I’m concerned, the Almighty put piñon here for the Navajo people,” says Tanner. “If you ever have a chance to watch a Navajo family go out and harvest piñon, stop what you’re doing, get some lunch, and watch. It’s a family event.” Per local lore, especially large yields of piñon only occur once every four years. Precise movements are required to pick the very best nuts: The piñon must be rolled gently between three fingertips. If the nut feels heavy through the rolling motion, you have a good piñon. If, by touch, the nut feels light, it is a dud. The only reliable way to pick piñon requires spending long hours beneath trees, perhaps with a small stool, and feeling each individual one by hand. The value of piñon also stems from the timeliness of the drop: The nuts are only good for about a month once they hit the ground.

For many years, piñon was a central cash crop for New Mexico: “Piñon is like gold,” you’ll hear locals say. Thus, those little nuts are worth a whole lot of cash if you choose to pick and sell them to the highest bidder. In the summer of 2020, piñon pickers were regularly selling nuts to local traders in Gallup for $15 a pound. If a picker finds a particularly rich tree, a pound can be collected in about an hour. Rumors swirled that in outlying areas across New Mexico, piñon was going for upwards of $40 a pound to the end customer. Therefore, the cash earned from picking can be vital for families in the region. According to 2019 census records, 79 percent of residents of McKinley County (which includes Gallup) were Native American, mostly hailing from the southeastern quadrant of the Navajo Nation and the entirety of the Zuni Pueblo to the south. The median household income hovered around $33,000 and 30 percent of residents lived below the poverty line, which is 12 percent higher than New Mexico at large. For these families, harvesting and trading piñon is often about more than tradition: it’s an important financial boost.

Jesica Adeky, a member of the Navajo Nation, picks piñon with her family each year.

“It’s like a seasonal job — I have a family member who picks piñon in the summertime and, with that money, buys silver and stones to work on silversmithing in the winter,” says Jesica Adeky, a local from the Checkerboard region off of Highway 602. Adeky lives in Bread Springs, New Mexico. Her swath of familial land is about 20 minutes south of Ellis Tanner’s gallery and is a parcel of Navajo Nation. During the day, Adeky balances two part-time jobs as an office assistant with the Bááháálí (Bread Springs) Navajo Nation chapter house and at Gallup’s public library. If Adeky is too busy working to pick piñon, she’ll reach out to a family member to pick for her and pay them for their labor.

The farther one gets from piñon epicenters like Gallup, the higher the price gets for the raw product from a picker. Adeky has heard of pickers going as far as Flagstaff, three hours away, to sell their product to a buying middleman. Often, getting out of the hyper-localized piñon epicenter into drier, less piñon-dense regions immediately gives sellers the upper hand to earn more money on the transaction. But more often than not, folks who pick are seeking same-day cash. As that middleman or broker, like Ellis Tanner, sells to the next, the retail price per pound begins to soar as it gets nearer to the final customer.

Brokering piñon is not what it used to be, Tanner explains. “During my watch, it seems like everything has gone downhill. When you get something, you hand it off to the next generation in better shape. With the piñons, the bark beetles have wreaked havoc on the trees. We’re handling 10 percent of what we used to handle in the 1960s. That’s all there is.” In the 1960s, Tanner recalls buying as much as a million pounds of piñon and distributing it from coast to coast. In 2020, even with the boom harvest of piñon, Tanner only purchased about 80,000 pounds of nuts.

Tanner is the first to admit that the majority of his piñon sales come from national wholesale buyers. While he sells some product through his trading post, all piñon goes through the same initial process. In the high season, Tanner buys piñon by the pound from local pickers. From there, he washes the nuts and cures the piñon to avoid rot (though his specific curing technique is a well-guarded secret). Once the nuts are cleaned and cured, he stores them in a ventilated storage space to await the next wholesale buyer. That buyer, once they purchase however many pounds of nuts from Tanner, seasons, shells, or otherwise alters the piñon to their own liking. From there, the piñon either finds its way to the end-eater or is traded through the hands of more middlemen as it makes its way to new, far-flung locales.

A scale in Ellis Tanner’s shop dedicated to weighing piñon, though he says the market is down compared to previous years.

Piñon have to be shucked by hand; it’s a time-intensive process

Even though retail prices for piñon are high and pickers can earn a decent sum per pound, Tanner clarifies that trading piñon doesn’t always equate to hefty returns on his investment, especially for the labor of drying, curing, and cleaning nuts. “If we make a 20-25 percent margin per pound, we’re doing a grand-slam home run. Most of the time we have a 10 percent margin.”

If Tanner sells the piñon he processes at his retail store directly, he can easily double what he bought the nuts for, but the vast proportion of sales do not come from retail in his shop, even with a community that adores them — he only retails about 5 percent of what he buys. But he still dreams of the boom years of piñon trading. “I wish I could buy in the old quantities. The biggest reason is all of the monetary revenue it would bring to the Navajo people.”

The road of trading piñon might not be as flush with profit as it used to be, but Tanner is hopeful about the economic opportunities for local pickers in selling their own piñon at retail and taking the middleman, like him, out of the equation. “I’m just here if you need me.”

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People have different means of finding their way to the fertile pines of Bread Springs to pick piñon. Some pull off to the side of Highway 602 because they heard through the grapevine that piñon has dropped. Others drive around aimlessly until they see pulled-over cars and then find a tree to pick. And many, like Adeky, have grown up on fertile land where piñon is just a few steps outside and picking each year is akin to retrieving candy left on your doorstep.

“My first memory of piñon is my grandmother shelling it by hand for me when I was 5 or 6,” says Adeky, smiling. “I would go with my grandmother to herd sheep and we’d bring piñon for long drives.”

Because picking piñon off of the ground requires so much time and concentration, modern harvesters have employed a number of contested tactics to expedite the process. One involves picking entire sappy pine cones off of the tree to whack out the nuts that haven’t naturally released just yet. A second involves placing blankets on the ground, grasping the body of a piñon tree, and shaking the whole tree to loosen nuts from the cones without touching them. “Traditionally for us Navajos, we’re told not to shake the trees because that attracts bears — it’s a bad omen,” says Colina Yazzie, the owner of Yazzie’s Indian Art in downtown Gallup.

Yazzie lives in Pinehaven, New Mexico, about seven miles from Bread Springs on the Checkerboard. Her work as a Native American jewelry broker leads her from Gallup to Sedona, Phoenix, and Santa Fe often, and she has a soft spot for local piñon. “They taste like fresh milk. They’re very rich.” For Yazzie, the best way to prepare freshly foraged piñon is to very, very meticulously roast them. “You wash the piñon, and when they’re still wet, you put them in a pan and turn the stove on medium heat. You stir until you can smell them roasting. One will pop — that’s when you know they’re done.”

In the fall of 2020, Yazzie decided to experiment with the products in her storefront by picking, roasting, and bagging her own piñon to sell alongside jewelry and crafts. “Most of the piñon sales were to Navajos — we really love piñon.” But Yazzie also sees piñon as a way to show a loved one a piece of home while they are far away. “My sister lives in Austin and I’ll send her piñon as a present because she doesn’t have access to it there.”

At one point in the glow of her gallery, I ask Yazzie if she is considering making the brokering of piñon — buying from pickers, roasting, and reselling — a bigger part of her business. “I would be, but just enough to roast myself and sell in the store. I just don’t have the space to store them or the muscle to load them around in.”

Colina Yazzie harvests piñon with her dogs; she sells them occasionally, but mostly she loves eating them herself.

Adeky describes picking piñon as something existing in the space between hobby, tradition, and custom. “You use picking to bring your family back together. It’s a reason to say, I need help, can you help me? It’s a giving thing, a way to be generous with others.”

On a windy Sunday last spring, I sat with Adeky inside a chain restaurant in Gallup, one of the only open ones in town. Off in the distance, the squat piñons were still mostly closed, waiting for the right moment in the coming months to open up and drop their fruit. At least, that was the hope. As the spring transitioned to a particularly heat-wave intensive summer, Adeky waited patiently to begin picking piñon from around her home. But as August transitioned to September and now as we creep into the cooler late fall temperatures, little piñon has been found on the Checkerboard. Adeky isn’t particularly concerned — she has a stash from the abundance of the 2020 drop. But the lack of piñon, even after a boom year, does make one question how the confluence of bark beetles and heat waves will impact the density of piñon in the region for the years to come. It also leaves the financial fate of many locals, who rely on the seasonal income stream of dense piñon drops, hanging in the balance.

But the boom and bust is all part of the lesson of piñon, says Adeky. “You learn from an early age that there are seasons when certain things happen,” she says. “It’s a type of teaching. In the summertime, you have to prepare yourself to have enough to eat for the winter. At the core, I think people know that. I hope people pick not just for selling, but for the understanding that there is a season of plenty.”

Karen Fischer is a writer living in New Mexico. Adria Malcolm is a photojournalist and cinematographer based in her hometown of Albuquerque, NM, focusing on long-term immersive stories.

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Why Is the Food in ‘Succession’ So Gross?

https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/why-is-the-food-in-succession-so-gross.html

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