Recipes of Passage From My Family’s New Orleans Kitchen
‘It’s my responsibility to make sure these meals are passed down’
By Akilah Toney
In my family, it’s a rite of passage for every toothless baby to eat mashed red beans and rice.
A maroon puree with specks of onion, bell pepper, and celery is served on a plate for the baby to beg for. (No spicy smoked sausage for baby, though. It’s quite delicious, but it’s a choking hazard.) Every spoonful of warm beans is rich with flavor. Even babies can tell each bean was infused with love.
When I was in elementary school, my mother would prepare a Sunday dinner for the next few days, while my father booed the New Orleans Saints in the third quarter of the game. My favorite Sunday meals were hot barbecue ribs and creamy shrimp pasta, or red beans and rice with a side of warm cornbread. My best memories of food in my home all have to do with the preparation of it. Making food at home is a family effort, even when you don’t want to make the food.
New Orleans children are often met with a dilemma in the kitchen, and I know it all too well. I have walked into the kitchen, oblivious to my mother stirring a pot on the stove. I’ve barely set foot onto the warm tile when she sharply makes eye contact with me, and I instantly realize walking into the kitchen to get something to drink was the biggest mistake I ever made.
“Chop up these onions for me, peel and clean these shrimps,” she side-eyes me and continues rhythmically pouring seasonings in a pot. And now I’m stuck in the hot kitchen for eternity. Although chopping onions makes my eyes burn like someone spit acid into them, I like doing it. And when a pot is on the stove, the kitchen feels like the seventh circle of Hell, but I like being there.
The kitchen is an opportunity to learn family history, gain wisdom from my elders, and become synced with my family’s way of cooking. That’s why I love it. For me, the best recipes don’t come from a celebrity cookbook; they come from the mouths of the multi-generational forebears of food.
What I love about most New Orleans foods is that a lot of the recipes stem from people who were overcoming oppression and adversity. Popular foods like gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya all have African diasporic roots. Stripped of rights, traditions, and belongings, enslaved Africans had to hold these recipes in their memory in order to survive through the horrors of chattel slavery. Enslaved Africans weren’t allowed to pass down monetary inheritance, but they passed down these savory recipes to their families. They persisted in making sure certain traditions stayed alive, even when their livelihood was based solely on using their bodies for American profit.
In this world, sometimes all you have is recipes to pass down.
Whenever I prepare food, I remember my mother’s mother and her mother and her mother and her mother. They passed down the ability to provide for generations of black people.
Because of them, these recipes live through me. It is my duty as a black New Orleanian to make sure my children and my children’s children receive the same kind of love and cooking as I have.
It’s important that we show our respect and keep cooking traditions like gumbo alive and authentic. One never truly receives the sustenance from a meal if the love is not there on the plate. It’s never just about the cooking. It’s where the recipe comes from, where the meal is going, who the meal is for, and who the meal will be for.
Akilah Toney, 17, is a published writer, artivist, dancer, actress, and photographer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
