771: 50 Years of Edna Lewis’s "The Taste of Country Cooking" with BEM’s Gabrielle Davenport

23:22Gabrielle Davenport:Totally. Yeah, that was a really, really wonderful pairing. We've been really lucky to have some amazing pairs of people in conversation in that space and to think we've only been there for six months. You know, it's like, what's coming next? I don't know. What's coming next is you guys are about to go on tour, right? Basically, yeah, that's a great way to describe it. I'm going to start describing it as going on tour. For the second year in a row, we were at both the Black Women in Food Summit in Washington, D.C. and at Biscuits and Banjos, which is a music and culture festival in Durham, North Carolina.

23:56Gabrielle Davenport:On the same weekend, two different states. Biscuits and Banjos was started by Rhiannon Giddens, who's a Grammy Award winning musician, composer, just really brilliant mind. She's a banjoist and has done really incredible work around asserting, I don't even know how to describe it, sort of black contributions to what we think of as Americana music. So that's really what the festival is about. We got to curate a couple of panels for it and, of course, sell some books, which we're always delighted to do. and it's really fun to take them on the road and meet people in all these other places both of those festivals Black Women in Food and Biscuits and Banjos attract people from all over the place and so it's always exciting to gather around food cultures and that's really what we get to do in those spaces Yeah, I think when you were here last time you were talking about going to different summer festivals and the books that you bring and seeing people interact with books in a space that is in a bookstore.

25:03And I feel like that really stuck with me and was something I was thinking about a lot, especially at a music festival, what kind of book do you want to carry around with you when you're going to your other sets for the day? It's probably different than when you're at a local bookstore.

25:16Gabrielle Davenport:A hundred percent. And actually this year for the first time, we started a whole pre-order pickup situation for Black Women in Food because last year a lot of folks were like, oh, I want to buy six of these books, but I did not plan for this in my suitcase to get back home. So it became a lot of strategizing at the counter. So for this year, we were able to offer, you know, order in advance. We'll ship them to you. If you want to get it personalized, of course, you have to buy it there because the authors will be there. But it was really great, and a lot of folks did do the pre-orders. And, you know, every year we're figuring out the best ways to get books to the people who want them and not drive ourselves crazy.

25:58Gabrielle Davenport:In the meantime, you know that Venn diagram. That Venn diagram is where I live. So that sort of pre-order pickup option turned out to be really lovely this year. Yeah, I think you and Danielle were saying last year there was, I think it was a Maya Angelou book of poetry. That was the perfect size for people to carry around with them. Do you have any tiny books for this year? Oh, that's a great question. That one is really good, too, because it's a paperback and literally it's pocket-sized. we don't have as many paperbacks for this year, which is a good point, especially for Black Women in Food.

26:35Yeah, I'm like, uh-oh. No, I'm not trying to put you back on your... No, it's like, oh, shoot, we should have gotten more paperbacks. But for Black Women in Food in particular,

26:42Gabrielle Davenport:they have an amazing lineup of speakers. So there's like, I think probably 10, around 10 speakers for the summit who also have cookbooks out. That's incredible. Yeah, it's really wonderful. So there's not much we can do about that. It's just the cookbooks and people at least have enough advance notice to plan. It's worth it. If they want to take the books home with them. Exactly. But yeah, we don't have as many paperbacks this year. So again, notes for next year. We're learning always. Exactly. Well, I think they both sound really successful and just great opportunities to be bringing them to different people.

27:17And I guess while we're talking about cookbook releases, there's a very important cookbook release coming out that we're here to talk about today.

27:24Gabrielle Davenport:Yes, indeed. We're so excited about it. The 50th anniversary edition of The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis came out yesterday on May 5th. And we're doing a whole festival for it. And it's so exciting. This is really one of the most important food books, I think, period, especially in American food. But there are a lot of people who probably haven't had the opportunity to sit down with it before. So if somebody is listening and they're maybe not that familiar with Edna Lewis or this book, can you give a little bit of a background download? Absolutely. Edna Lewis was a chef. She was born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, which was a community settled by formerly enslaved folks, one of whom was her grandfather.

28:09Gabrielle Davenport:And so The Taste of Country Cooking, which is one of four cookbooks I think that she published before she passed, is really about growing up in that community and eating what you and your community can grow or catch or butcher, etc. And it is such a beautiful assertion of the dignity of a rural community, which I think, you know, she published this in 1976. She had already been cooking in New York City, had already published another cookbook prior to this and was living what I think we now understand as a very cosmopolitan city life. Yeah. And the memories and just the beautiful writing in the book are so transportive and make you make me want to plant a beautiful garden and, you know, live on a commune with my friends.

29:12Gabrielle Davenport:Yeah. It's a really beautiful book. And it's talking about things like what we would consider to be the farm to table movement today, but not necessarily with that terminology and these kinds of like heritage foodways that I think also maybe weren't getting as much mainstream attention in that moment. A hundred percent. A lot of chefs will talk about Edna Lewis as being sort of a progenitor of what we now think of as farm to table cooking. I was also I was rereading the book. We've been reading it a lot in preparation for the festival. and there is the 2006 edition which was a 30-year anniversary edition has a forward by Alice Waters and she talks about sort of culturally what was going on in 1976 when the book first came out and how industrialized food had become and people had just sort of been like well that's just what it is.

30:08Gabrielle Davenport:That's how we eat. And for her to publish this book about not soul food, but Southern food and Southern food that is from fresh seasonal ingredients. And there's so much about really celebrating like the first chickens of the spring. And, you know, when the berries are the ripest, like it's really, really, really about what's coming out of the ground. And that was really subversive at that time. So she's been, you know, very, very, very influential, certainly to a lot of the chefs that we work with at BIM. Absolutely. And I think I remember reading that Judith Jones, the cookbook editor, was involved in the book.

30:47Is that true? Absolutely.

30:48Gabrielle Davenport:So Judith Jones was her editor for her first book. I think the first one was the Edna Lewis cookbook. She had been cooking at Cafe Nicholson, which was this sort of communist writer's haunt in Midtown. I'm obsessed with the lore of Cafe Nicole. Yeah, I learned about it through Edna Lewis. This was like an early Soho restaurant run mostly by queer people. And they kind of like, what's the word I'm looking for? Upcycled, I guess. Like they took a bunch of abandoned like doors and materials, used it to build the space. And then it became this very like legendary downtown restaurant. And she was doing the food there.

31:28Yeah, which is like, dream. I'd like to go there.

31:31Gabrielle Davenport:Yeah, so apparently she was hosting all of these really iconic dinner parties and was not cooking professionally at the time. And some of the folks that, or the founders of Cafe Nicholson were going to those dinner parties and they're like, you're going to be the chef at our restaurant. She was like, okay. And so it began. And so the Edna Lewis cookbook was sort of designed to capture the recipes from Cafe Nicholson and weren't necessarily specifically Southern. I think my understanding from what the food was like at the restaurant is that it was slightly more European oriented, still very much influenced by the way that she grew up and the food that she grew up around.

32:14Gabrielle Davenport:But it was by no means focused on how she grew up. And then I believe Judith Jones was like, what I really want to hear about is how you came to cook in the first place and how you came to cook like this. And through some sort of massaging, they ended up with what would become The Taste of Country Cooking. And, you know, we're so grateful for it because it's a special book. And this is Judith Jones, who, you know, edited Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, who rescued the diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. Like, she really. I did not know that. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Wow.

32:50I can't imagine reading that and deciding to not do something with it. But I think it's interesting to look at these kind of interwoven webs of these books that we consider to be seminal today and how they kind of came about.

33:03Gabrielle Davenport:Yeah. And I mean, it's so not to go off on too far of a tangent, but there's another book that just came out about Toni Morrison's editorship at Penguin. And it is, you know, when you talk about sort of cultural gatekeepers and those that do it responsibly and with integrity and how important those kinds of roles are, not just for editors, but sort of folks of all kinds who are working, quote unquote, behind the scenes to present the cultural work that we all take in. It's really remarkable. And it's important for us to know who those folks are. Yeah. Do you have the title of that book? I can find it.

33:40Okay. Yes. I'll look it up and I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, it's really, really wonderful. I think we'll have a long list of books in the show notes by the end of the conversation. So, okay, we've established why this book was so important when it was released. Can you speak to what the 50th anniversary reissue looks like and maybe how it's been expanded upon?

34:00Gabrielle Davenport:Yeah. So the 50th anniversary edition has a foreword by culinary journalist and historian Tony Tipton Martin, who is also a fierce advocate for Southern foodways. She was one of the founders, I believe, of the Southern Foodways Alliance and is just a really important chronicler of American and Southern and Black foodways. So she wrote a beautiful foreword to the book. And the physical item, you know, sits a little bit differently. The dimensions are a little different. It's slightly bigger. It has more color in it. Even the 30th anniversary edition, I don't think, has any color at all, I don't think.

34:48Gabrielle Davenport:They kept a lot of the lovely sort of like pencil-drawn illustrations of, you know, various sort of flora and fauna. And so it still very much has the spirit of at least the version of it that I am most familiar with. And it has the forward and the introduction by Alice Waters and Judith Jones from the 2006 edition in the back. And it's really, as far as I can tell, a lot of the recipes and the rest of the writing are really untouched. But it's about, you know, reintroducing in some cases or introducing for the first time, as you described, a really seminal food text to folks who need a reason for it to be in front of them again.

35:33Yeah, I love that. And I like hearing that there's the previous four words existing in the book. It's so cool to see this kind of evolving record of how different people have thought about this book over time. A hundred percent. And it's such a, you know, a lot of the The work that we do feels like a real celebration of women's work.

35:53Gabrielle Davenport:And there's a lot of obviously fabulous and brilliant people of all genders doing great work around food. And for food to have been such a fraught space for so many women, not just food, but the kitchen and domesticity to be such a fraught space for so many women and femmes, for so many brilliant people and brilliant women to claim that space. and be really ingenious and really brilliant and really precise. It's not just about like, oh, I just showed up in the kitchen and all this magic unfolded. It's like this is real work that people are committing to over whole careers. And I think that this 50th anniversary edition with these four women's voices in it, even in small ways in the introductions and forwards, is really special and inspiring.

36:40Absolutely. And I think a lot of people are really excited and inspired by this book. And kind of in that spirit, you have a lot of events coming up that are a part of it. Can you tell us about what's going on? Yes.

36:52Gabrielle Davenport:So we have what we're calling the Edna Lewis Festival kicking off today. We had a dinner last night, a fundraiser at Gage and Tolner, where Edna Lewis cooked for many years in collaboration with the Edna Lewis Foundation. And starting today, we have a whole series of programs at BEM in Bed-Stuy. So tonight we're doing a documentary screening of Finding Edna Lewis with the host and producer of the doc, Deb Freeman. And she'll be in conversation with Mashama Bailey, who is a brilliant chef in her own right, and also the head of the Edna Lewis Foundation. So that'll be really wonderful to have the two of them in discussion.

37:39Gabrielle Davenport:Tomorrow, we will have a day of cafe activations and just sort of you can drop in and be immersed in the world of the book. So that one's not ticketed. You can come by our space from 11 to 6 to participate in that. On Friday, we have a panel exploring sort of the pillars of Miss Lewis's legacy of food, land and community and a Virginia Wine Hour to close off the evening, which will be really fun. On Saturday, we're doing some family programs and a hands-on pickling workshop, which will be very exciting. There's a whole section, whole chapter dedicated to preserving and pickling in the book, so excited to dive into that.

38:21Gabrielle Davenport:and Sunday we wrap up with a gospel brunch and benediction with Tony Tipton Martin herself and Lana Lagomarsini the chef will be doing the food for that and it's going to be really really special so more information is available at benbrooklyn.com and we hope to do it again next year we're just getting started but we're really excited about it that is such a incredible lineup of events I I just heard gospel brunch and had to catch my breath. I love that you're already thinking about doing it next year because it seems like there's a lot of plates up in the air for this year. And every person you've mentioned who's involved is such an important and iconic person in food today.

39:05It's really special to get to bring everyone together.

39:08Gabrielle Davenport:It's amazing. We're really, yeah, we're really excited. There's so many more people that we wish we could have had more room for, sort of programming-wise, which is why it's like, okay, we're already planning for what we hope will be the next one. But yeah, I think it also speaks to the work of Edna Lewis that there are so many people still writing, thinking, cooking in her legacy. That's what it means to be an icon. You know, I think that there's still so many people who are really inspired by, in many ways, like the timelessness of what she was writing about in The Taste of Country Cooking. Yeah, and I like how you have so many different methods and opportunities for people to connect with the work, to be able to come by and have like more of a casual time at the store, to go to Gage and Tolner, which is this iconic Brooklyn steakhouse that she was running the kitchen at.

40:03And they have some dishes on the menu today that are like her exact recipe from, I think, 50 years ago, probably more. Yeah. I think she came to Gage and Tolner, I believe, in the 90s. Okay, not 50 years ago. So 30, that's still a long time, you know, and as far as I understand it, she really was a part of sort of reviving Gage and Tolner and bringing it back to, you know, a version of its

40:32Gabrielle Davenport:previous sort of glory. So, yeah, the she crab soup is still on the menu and she's still very much a part of the sort of origin story that they tell there, which I think is really, really important. Yeah. And you were speaking to kind of how all these people are inspired by her. And maybe that is obvious just because of the quality of her work being so profound. But I'm curious if you think there's something specific about Edna Lewis and maybe like what she represents or what she created that you think is so resonant for people today and makes people want to gather. That's a great question. I do think that the sort of focus on beautiful ingredients and high quality ingredients and eating them at their freshest or preparing them at their freshest is certainly something that has been in the zeitgeist for a while now and is something that people are still excited about and sort of excited to be in pursuit of, even if that can be challenging.

41:35Gabrielle Davenport:depending on where you are. I also think she was so... The sense I get is that she was really self-possessed, right? Like she really knew what she was about. She seemed very clear in her purpose. And I think that that is magnetic no matter what you're doing. It comes through in the pages of this book when you hear people talk about her that really comes across. And I think people are always looking for, you know, role models who feel like they had it figured out and they can, you know, can learn from not just about, again, the content, but just sort of how to, how you carry yourself, how you present yourself, those kinds of things.

42:23And, you know, it's not lost on folks that her,

42:27Gabrielle Davenport:as a Black woman from the South being in the spaces that she was in and, you know, being at the helm of these New York City culinary institutions. That was an anomaly at the time and, you know, for a long time was really, really rare. And so for her to be the first doing that and also like she didn't go to culinary school, You know, like she learned to cook from her family and did it really, really well and made a beautiful career of it, which I think, again, a lot of folks can that resonates with a lot of people. And again, it's inspiring. Yeah, I think I agree with everything you say. And maybe to add to that, I think she seemed really capable of looking far forward and also to the past at the same time.

43:18I think if you look at her work, she was so ahead of her time in many ways and a visionary and also really dedicated to preserving foodways and traditions. And I read something that one of the reasons why she made the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, which was kind of the precursor to the Southern Foodways Alliance, was that she wanted to make sure people wouldn't forget how to cook with lard. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, very important. And she had the forethought to think like, well, maybe this is going out of fashion and won't be around, but this is important to like the basis of this food that is so important to people.

43:53I think like she just seemed to be really, you're right, like true to herself and understanding of the larger world that she was existing in. Yeah.

44:02Gabrielle Davenport:And I think, you know, Southern food has Southern food and then the ways that it gets sort of alighted into soul food and they are distinct is maligned for being greasy and unhealthy and all of these other things. But the reasons why lard, for example, was an important part of the food is because, as she describes in this book, part of the way of life was making use of the whole animal. Right. So why get rid of that thing that actually has a lot of functionality? Right. And we don't want to be wasteful. So that makes a lot of sense. And I love that. Yeah. So much to love. And I want to play a little bit of a hypothetical with you, which is if Edna Lewis happened to come into BAM, what books would you recommend to her?

44:57I would first probably melt into a puddle on the floor and be like, how did this happen? Am I alive? Real? Exactly. Where are we? What version of The Matrix have I entered?

45:10Gabrielle Davenport:I would Danielle and I were talking about this question actually on my way over here and both of us the first thing we said was pray song for the kitchen ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson which is also in the vein of a sort of memoiric cookbook lots of beautiful writing lots of recipes lots of family lore throughout. I would have loved to have heard what Miss Lewis thought of that book. And if it sort of resonated with her, as it has with so many people who have come through and purchased it from us. It's really a book that is about bringing your ancestors into the kitchen with you, which I think a lot of folks think of Edna Lewis, whether they're related to her or not.

45:48Gabrielle Davenport:Think of her in that way. And she's one of those sort of cooking ancestors that a lot of people are calling on. So that's certainly one of them. And then there's such an amazing sort of roster of books by authors who talk about Edna Lewis as being one of their primary influences. And it would just be really beautiful to, like, stack that, you know, stack those cookbooks miles high to be like, this is some of what your legacy has made way for. And, you know, thank you. And to just sort of watch her leaf through them would be really fabulous. So books like Recipes from the American South by Michael Twitty or The Up South by Nicole Taylor.

46:35Gabrielle Davenport:We just got a few more copies of Soul by Todd Richards, who's a chef based in Atlanta. And it's a really, really, really beautiful book and feels very much in the spirit of the taste of country cooking. I'm sure there are some that I'm forgetting, but there's just, oh, Black, White and the Gray, Mishama Bailey's. memoir with John Morisano, her business partner. There are so many books that I think are built off of the legacy of Anna Lewis that it would be pretty special to gather them all and be able to show them to her, present them to her. I think her even just coming into BEM, which is a space for all people, but specifically focuses on Black food books, and for her to be able to say, this is a whole bookstore dedicated to that, especially knowing the landscape that she was published in, on its own, would probably be so powerful.

47:23Yeah, that would be amazing.

47:26Gabrielle Davenport:An amazing special guest appearance. Yeah. So thank you for that question. I love that question. Well, I guess I'll follow it up with. So after she sees all the books and she's hungry, where did you take her to eat? That's the harder one, probably. Yeah, that is a really hard question. I mean, it would be amazing to go back to Gage and Tolner with her and just to see, to hear her talk about like what feels the same, what feels different. Are they getting If you're seeing a ghost, you would die. Yeah, exactly. Also that, like, you know, is the she crab soup still tasting the way that you would want it to?

48:00That would be totally unbelievable. Yeah, I think the fried chicken is her recipe, too. Is it fried to her liking? Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Yeah, so that would be absolutely insane. But I feel like, especially since we opened, you know, six months ago, there are so many restaurants that I haven't been to. I don't, you know, I live two blocks away from the shop, so I don't get out very far. unfortunately. So I don't even know what other places would be fun to take her to. I think about also other restaurants that are no longer open. That would be really cool to go to with her, like B. Smith's restaurants, which I think were open.

48:39Gabrielle Davenport:Yeah, they must have been open while she was in New York. I have no idea if she frequented them or ever went, but that would just be like a black woman chef like meeting of the minds which would be really cool to sit in on um I think also um maybe she would enjoy going to Tatiana yeah she's restaurant and seeing this like just temple of a restaurant at Lincoln Center and yes that's so true that's so true yeah that's yeah I think you're bringing up a great point about um just like what does the dining scene in New York look like now versus when she first moved to New York and wasn't even necessarily working in food versus when she was at Gage and Tolner like there's been a lot of eras of New York food since then.

49:25I was trying to think about is there an equivalent to Cafe Nicholson in terms of like a sceny like downtown yeah but not I think the problem is that Cafe Nicholson was the blueprint and then anything that comes after is obviously not going to be as cool Yeah, I mean, yeah, they're so—I also was thinking about her, like, political communist sort of awakening.

49:48Gabrielle Davenport:And if there are any of the—like, it would have been interesting to take her to, like, Community Kitchen, which is not currently operating anymore. But the project that Mark Bittman and Mavis J. Sanders and them were doing, that would have been really cool. ACQ Bread Co. in Gowanus is, like, a worker co-op bakery. She might be into that. I would actually love to talk to her. I feel like that's a piece of her legacy that is mentioned, but I don't know a ton about. Like, it's not as, you know, with good reason. People are talking about the food a lot with her. And I would love to learn more about what that sort of, yeah, sort of political awakening was like for her, especially through food.

50:28Gabrielle Davenport:That would be really fun. Yeah. Well, I think we've covered it. So if she for some reason appears, give me a call. I'll meet you at one of the restaurants. Excellent. We will go. It'll be amazing. I guess before we go into rapid fire to close, I want to ask you just looking ahead at summer, what you're looking forward to reading. It could be a new release. It could be an old release. It doesn't have to be a food book. But I think this is one of my favorite times of year to just carry a book around with me and read everywhere in New York. Totally. It is the best time of year for that. There are a few books I'm really excited about.

51:00Gabrielle Davenport:One is called Black Fish by Speech DeBelle, who's a UK-based musician and also writer. And it's about, it's sort of like halfway practical guide, half memoir about speech sort of finding themselves through learning how to fish. Oh, cool. Which is really cool. So I'm really excited to read that, especially from someone who is a rapper and a poet. I'm just excited to see all of the sort of different forms come together on the page. That one I'm very much looking forward to. Toya Bodhi, who's a chef from New Orleans, has a new cookbook coming out in June called Cooking from Scratch, which is inspired by Melinda Russell's domestic cookbook, which is the first known cookbook published by a black woman in the U.S.

51:53Gabrielle Davenport:and it's, you know, like most cookbooks that came out in the late 1800s, obviously the measurements look really different. There's a lot of like home, not even home remedy is not the right word, but like, you know, there's a lot of sort of recipes for things you're not necessarily eating. So I'm really curious to see how Toya sort of adapts those. I think it'll be fun. And then I recently went to, I guess it wasn't recent, it was in February, but I went to the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute because I am really a book nerd and it was really fun. And there was a book exchange at one point, and I got a copy of Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which came out in the 70s also and is a novel about if sort of like a plague arrived to stop the progression of Black culture.

52:54Gabrielle Davenport:And it's a really sort of one of one book. I just started reading it. And I'm excited to finish that because it's one that people talk about a lot that I've not gotten to read. So I'm looking forward to that. And it's a paperback to go to festivals, to take to various festivals and be in the park and all that kind of stuff. It's such an eclectic array of books that all sound so great in their own right. And I'm going to have to add this to my ever extending. I have like a note on my phone. I'm sure it's like pages long. The only thing longer than that is probably the number of alarms that I have set.

53:28But that one is definitely a better thing to look at. Yeah, that sounds great. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card. With unlimited 2 % cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited 5 % cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online, and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership.

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54:38Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money-making machine? Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. I want to play a rapid-fire game to close, so I'll ask you some questions. Sure. Just tell me the first answer. Okay, a favorite cookbook right now?

54:58Gabrielle Davenport:The Caribbean Cookbook by Ralston Williams is really, really beautiful and full of delicious things. Yeah. A favorite spot to eat near Bem's location in Bed-Stuy? um peaches is a soul food slash southern restaurant to our earlier point um that's right up the block that i love and is really delicious i've also been on fridays i tend to get like chicken over rice or lamb over rice from our local bodega and we love them and the food is delicious so those are the two that sort of come to mind but there's a bunch of great little spots near us, which is really fun. Is it the bodega, like, across the street, up a block?

55:40Diagonal? Yeah, that's a good one. It's a great one. Yeah, so that tends to be how I get through my Fridays, and I look forward to it. That's great. A favorite New York City bookstore that isn't your own? Oh, there are so many. We got to participate in the Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl for the first time this year, and it was so nice to be on a list with 34 other bookstores in Brooklyn.

56:04Gabrielle Davenport:Wow. Which is amazing. One of my favorites, though, is Liz's Book Bar in Carroll Gardens. It's a bookstore, wine bar, just great energy. It's always lovely in there. Whenever I go in there, it is absolutely packed with people hanging out and reading, which is such a nice environment to be around. Yeah, it's just a nice thing to see. Yeah, I love that place and Maura's the best. So I go there whenever I can, which is not that often, but I'm happy to whenever I can visit. Your go-to ice cream flavor? I have a lot of allergies. So whatever like dairy-free sorbet is available or if someone makes a banging coconut milk-based ice cream, I'm probably down.

56:45Gabrielle Davenport:I love ice cream, but it's tricky. That's very fair. Yeah. Your go-to food to bring to a summer potluck? I've decided that this is going to be a summer of like bean and grain salads for me. A dense bean salad. Yeah, you know, because I always enjoy eating them, but I don't make them that often. I made one with like black rice and chickpeas from adapted from Duane Nutter's cutting up in the kitchen. And it was like, this is so delicious and so easy to eat and mixed with other things. So that's going to be my potluck item. I think that's a great choice because you can also, it's so easy to make a little more and then keep some for yourself, like for lunch the next day.

57:27You got to strategize about these things. That's, yeah, I'm trying to eat a lot of beans and grains. Totally. So last time you were here, I asked you about a fictional food scene that you wish you could eat. This time, I want to ask you for three fictional characters you would like to invite to a dinner party.

57:42Gabrielle Davenport:Okay, this question was challenging for me because a lot of what I've been reading most recently, even in like the last several years, are not quite fiction. Even if they're historical fiction, it's about like real people. So I'm like, I don't know. I'll accept real people. Okay, I was like, I'm like, I felt stumped by this question a little bit. I thought you were going to say you're worried about them getting along, which is where my brain went. Also that one of them also was a child. I was like, I mean, yay for intergenerational discussions. But one of them was the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, who were real people sort of in the face of the Trujillo dictatorship.

58:22Gabrielle Davenport:And I would love to talk to them because, first of all, the book is so beautiful. and it's just an insane story and I would love to interview them, chat with them. One of the other people, characters, I should say that came to mind is a character named Indigo from a book called Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo by Ntozaki Shange. She's the youngest sister of a group of three sisters that this book is about and she is what we would describe as an Indigo child and very connected sort of spiritually even as a really young person. And over the course of the book, She grows up a little bit, but the version of her that really sticks out in my head is the kid version.

59:02Gabrielle Davenport:So this is sort of an insane dinner party, but it would be cool to meet her. It's all sisters. It's also so fun. I was going to say, it's all about sisters, which feels fitting. Yeah. But yeah, those are two groups, I guess, that kind of emerged for me for this question. Well, I have a sister, so can I come be the third person? Yes, yes. You are welcome. You're invited. We'll eat at BAM. It'll be great. Okay. Well, I love this fantasy dinner party. And thank you so much for coming back in the show to talk about Anna Lewis with me. I feel really excited to check out the new book. And I hope everyone listening feels the same.

59:37Thank you so much.

59:42This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergang Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skurzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com. And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste.

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