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The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Therese Nelson, chef, writer and student of Black culinary history, was prompted to empower herself with knowledge when she noticed lack of upward mobility among the Black chefs in the kitchens where she worked. She realized that entrepreneurship would be her saving grace, but she had to develop language to relate her culinary aesthetic to her clients. It’s a common misconception to equate black cuisine with soul food, but the two are not necessarily always synonymous. Black chefs today are infusing African diasporic flavors into classically standard recipes and using traditional techniques to create dishes, creating quintessentially Black food experiences. By adjusting the ingredients in her pantry, Nelson can turn a traditionally French dish like duck confit, into one that reflects her aesthetic, which she describes as “honest new American cuisine with an African diasporic lens.”
She built the website, Black Culinary History, as a resource for chefs interested in learning more about black cuisine. The website is for the 18-year-old just starting culinary school to the 55-year-old who has been disillusioned by the mainstream. According to Nelson, perusing Black Culinary History is a pick your own adventure type resource. You can start with YouTube videos or purchase one of the many cookbooks featured on the site. Though Nelson has built a useful resource that anyone can use, her interest isn’t to translate food for the general public but to arm Black culinary professionals with the tools they need to respect Black foodways. When she started Black Culinary History, she composed a manifesto and sent it 40 Black chefs. She wanted to start a conversation concerning their desire for information about Black culinary tradition and her role in that tradition. This manifesto still guides her work. MADAMENOIRE connected with Nelson to talk about her passion for Black cuisine. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
MADAMENOIRE: Where do you get your love of food from?
Therese Nelson: My grandparents are from South Carolina. It’s a very particular part of the state. It’s sort of central. But they’re from a place where even if you didn’t have much monetarily, food is one place where you can express hospitality, express care, love is a trite word, but you can express care for someone easily. It’s universally translatable. But that’s how it was. My grandfather was not the best cook, but he was a very passionate cook. And growing up, I don’t have these overtly passionate food memories. I know chefs who just ate beautifully. And they have all these amazing stories about recipes that their people gave them. I don’t necessarily have those experiences. We were food insecure for a lot of my life, financially precarious a lot of my life. I saw the power of the care that went into preparing a meal. I found food professionally on a much more pragmatic level. I could cook. It’s something I was technically good at, and I didn’t understand that it was a viable, real career until late in high school. I thought I was going to be a computer engineer. I got into Rutgers early. By junior year, I thought I knew what my life was going to be. But I was looking around at all these people in the tech industry who were so excited and passionate about what they were doing, and I couldn’t imagine signing my life over to something I wasn’t just as interested or excited about. I could do it–wasn’t necessarily excited. Food was one of those things. But once I went to culinary school, I had the idea that there was this whole world of beautifully crafted food that I could make a life for myself in. I’m a technically excellent cook. I love the idea that I can imagine in my mind raw materials and use my hands to create something beautiful. And that exchange is powerful. It’s less about the food itself for me and more about the exchange.
What was your early experience in food like?
I went to Johnson & Wales, and it feels like a finishing school for a lot of restaurant people. They send their kids there. There were a lot of people who had a lot more experience than I did. And it was also a very pragmatic school, so they’re grooming you to go into very traditional corporate environments like restaurant empires instead of single chef led restaurants. It’s not that same language. So, back then I sensed that the ways they were telling me were the most credible. These very rigid, white male centric environments I was going to enter were the only ways to be credible. I didn’t think about being a restaurant chef because it just didn’t make sense to me. I always wanted to be a caterer because all the examples of people of color, especially women of color, I knew of, were in catering. I’m a catering and private chef. And it was initially not the case. But certainly, as I’ve become more concerned with culture and history, these were spaces that have always been the most profitable. They have always been the dexterous and most expansive in terms of culinary voice, and so intuitively I knew this was an area I would be more effective in. So, the first five or six years of my career, I worked at hotels because they felt to me like the boot camp of catering. I was able to work in essentially every area of the hospitality industry. I worked at Four Seasons for a long time.
But there was just this feeling that information was most important for me. The thing I was learning at that time was certainly about how to build my business, but also about where the real power lies and even these environments where the executive chef was always a white man with the exception of one place, the folks who were actually doing the most consistent work, who were the most responsible for the taste and the core of every operation, I would say 80% of the operations I worked in, were Black women, especially in the South. Charleston for example, Geechee and Gullah cultures are so primary when you think of Charleston. It’s become a culinary destination. But when I was in culinary school it was the retirement village – the summer retreat for rich white southerners. And the culinary identity of that town was so constructed and fictitious. It was weirdly a southern French European aesthetic. But it had this sort of Gullah undertone.
Esau Graham, this man literally responsible for the taste of Charleston Place Hotel, trained every sous chef, every executive chef that came through that restaurant. The lesson I learned from working with him is in this place that is so iconic, Esau was never going to be the boss. Partly because of his own ambition, but also because in this place the system that existed valued him in the space that he existed in and was never going to defer power to him. I think that a lot of that narrative is changing especially as younger people, more ambitious, more subversive, young people are entering into an industry that is evolving and has been forced to change in a lot of ways. Generationally, the Esau Grahams are passing away, as well and leaving the industry. That’s a factor as well, but I mention all that just to say that for me at least when I was beginning, because of the historical timeline of the culinary industry I entered, there was a very particular message about mobility and people like Esau Graham.
What did you do with that information? Once you were in that space and you witnessed what occurs, what did you do?
Mostly I internalized it. I started making plans for myself that were certainly plans to subvert it. I moved back to New York, a couple years after graduation and that was the time of certainly building my skills. I worked for Four Seasons for three years when I first got here and I learned a ton. The bulk of what my technical ability is stems from that time just because there were so many opportunities then. I met friends of my mom who were writing a cookbook and didn’t have any culinary background. So, I got my first taste of book publishing. I was able to recipe consult and food style. Early in my career I got to see other areas outside the kitchen but also began to cater and really do the thing I thought I wanted to do. The messages I learned in Charleston and Atlanta, were about lack of mobility in traditional spaces, so I was going to have to define a culinary space for myself which meant entrepreneurship.
We were four Black women. So, they would see our skin and think that we would create these soul food menus. I just came from this intensive French new American, very on trend beautiful menus with amazing ingredients, and they wanted to know about fried chicken. I wasn’t defensive about what they wanted. I was ill informed and didn’t have a vocabulary broad enough to express what my Blackness looked like through that lens. So, I started my site mainly as a question to other Black chefs. Who can I look to to give me more information to be more effective as a chef? The gig I think for any chef is to define your aesthetic and your toolbox of technical ability to a paying customer. That can look like lots of things. In any endeavor it must be about how confident and clear you are about your message. So often we subscribe to this weird homogenous blackness that doesn’t get hyper specific. And in turn allows a customer or someone who isn’t as familiar with our culture to generalize and marginalize it as well.
At which time in your career did you have to pivot quickly to fill a void in your industry? Let’s cheers to the swift.
A moment of pivot for me was regrouping after the economic downturn of 08′. I was like many of my peers trying to find a new purpose in a changing industry, and I found my calling. I realized that being a chef was about cultural stewardship, and the work I do now is in service of this idea. I wouldn’t have come to it without having my path disrupted and being forced to regroup in real-time. That disruption changed my life.
So, what does Black History Month mean to you? Do you do anything special to celebrate?
I think of Black History Month as a grounding time. I do a lot of lecturing during that month and it’s always a time of recalibration for me. Black History Month is a time to level set; a time to think about what my Blackness means to me; what the work I’m doing is going to mean for the next year; assess how clear the ideas that I have are; and how expansive I can make it over the next twelve months. Especially because cultural spaces are getting so much more interesting. I’m tracking where these conversations are being had. And they really are happening in lots of ways outside of the culinary industry proper. But I would say that Black History Month is a really good time for folks to think about value and the power of black culture, food, and their relationship with food. I think about how we use and how we think about black food culture, and it really is about placemaking, and memory and it is about nostalgia. Black History Month is a beautiful time to consider nostalgia and how we use Black culture and what it really could look like if we were intentional about the ways we apply it.
How important is it that we know about Black culinary history and why is it important for people to know this history?
Dillard University has the Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture. Ray Charles loved everything about New Orleans. He understood that New Orleans is about music, it is about food. It’s one of those cities that we think about so often when we think about hospitality. It’s one of the great food cities, and it is that because they have a clear understanding of the interconnectivity of material culture. Everything is intertwined. I think Black culture is exactly that. It’s the story of our resilience; how we make space for ourselves and each other. Certainly, our music, art, and writing. All those areas are wonderful heirlooms to point to black culture, to define Black culture. In our food we see history. We see so many derivative stories that tell us who we are and reflect ourselves back to us.
Which Martell cocktail recipe do you prefer?
The Swift Sour with the yuzu would be the go-to drink. The sour is the one.
Try Thérèse’s go-to cocktail, the Swift Sour! Simply click here for the recipe.
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