Burek and BarbecueMichael Twitty
Today we feature an essay from Michael Twitty, the historian who spoke about culinary injustice at MAD3, on what happens when lay cooks from different parts of the world meet:
The dialogues about food that take place when people of different backgrounds meet, unscripted and off-camera, are a vital resource. Do we ever stop to think about the remarkable narratives we have lost, the stories behind the great techniques and flavors that have come down to us? In preserving memories of these encounters, carrying these narratives forward, what’s at stake is not merely the genesis of our favorite culinary expressions or trivial knowledge surrounding their birth, but a new ability to use food to foment change, based on mutual understanding and a deeper awareness of human interconnectedness.
It’s easy to grow up as I did, totally unaware of the multiple collisions that brought food to the table. We plant flags in our food early, insisting that we make them the best, and that nobody else can make them as we do. My elder cousin’s delicious “nut roll”, for instance, was neither African nor American, but somehow it became African American in her hands. In fact, it was an Austro-Hungarian cake, likely with many Eastern European and Middle Eastern influences, that in the hands of the daughter of Southern migrants living in Pittsburgh lost its walnuts in favor of pecans, and was sweetened not with honey but with rich touches of cane and sorghum syrup. Blacks from the South and European immigrants shared coal mines and steel mills, and when someone was born, married or buried, cakes and plates of food accompanied notes and went through screen doors. All of us are contributors and partakers in moments long forgotten.
I came to western North Carolina to bring the diners back to the beginnings of barbecue. I came to show and demonstrate an old tradition: meat slowly roasted over an open hardwood fire, heavily spiced. In a place with only the mildest sense of diversity, I didn’t expect to meet someone from a part of the world that seemed more antipode than analogy. I came to teach, but with a song on the wind, I was about to be taught.
"Burek, burek, o usta murat!" sung in Albanian with a Kosovar accent came down the verdant NoCarolina hills, flying and falling through the hickories, oaks and pines like a playful cardinal. The only word I recognized was burek(a)\borek(a), and I wasn't even sure the person singing was speaking of the same thing. The lilting little tune kept coming towards me until it terminated in a "Hayloww!" from a head-scarfed woman wearing tiny pearl earrings, in a dusty dark blouse and grey skirt. She looked happy but worn, simultaneously ancient and brand-new; and her expression, like her accent, was caught between Balkan and Appalachian.
Michael Twitty: "Southern Discomfort — Confronting Culinary Injustice" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
"How are you doing? Can you understand myyy English?" she said.
"Yes, Ma'am, I'm doing all right. Just making a barbecue pit today!"
"Yays Ma'am!" She clapped her hands. "Barbaycue? When it is special, we roast the lamb on the spit in Kosovo, you use these sticks and a hole?"
"Why yes, this is the old fashioned way, going back to the way Black slaves did it before the Civil War.” I go on to tell her that I am a culinary historian focused on the lives and foods of America’s slaves; a preserver of memories through food; a reenactor of the edible past. I almost felt proud to tell her this. Then I studied her spinach hands, as richly lined as driftwood, and they reminded me of my Grandmother’s hands; humility and reverence pulsed in me.
“What was the song you were singing? Was it about burekas?"
More smiles in attack formation: "What do you call them? Burekas! Ha! How do you know burek?" I had unlocked a part of her that seemed lonely here in the South; she looked as though she had already given up explaining herself here. I told her how I learned to love burekas from the Sephardic Jewish community to which I belonged. Then I asked her to sing the song back to me and explain its meaning.
She spoke of warm burek filled with local cheese, ground lamb, onions, or leafy greens, sold from a basket on a bike. She spoke of war and conflict, death and remorse; of missing relatives, burying children, and over a million people displaced. She spoke of the dozens of Kosovar tribes, and of fierce independence. She was not just a cook; she was a refugee, and her song, like her cooking, had taken refuge with her here in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina. I asked about the making of phyllo dough, which to me is as difficult as difficult gets. "Come back, and I will teach you!” she said. “It is the simplest thing ever!"
She was as curious about my barbecue as I was about her burek. My mind immediately went to chopping hickory- and oak-smoked meat and hiding it in a bed of phyllo dough. We spoke of cornmeal gruel and grits, of leafy greens cooked in springtime, of deep frying and okra, fresh tomatoes in a stew and hot peppers drying in the sun. The intestines of lamb met chitlins (the Southern name for the small intestine of a hog). As we talked, memories and recipes merged, taking on a fresh survival as they morphed and became Albanian-African-American-Southern.
As she talked, I was surprised at how everything in her life referenced the foods of her heritage and her youth. She moved up and down the rows of her steep, neatly planted hillside garden, discussing the plans for each fruit, leaf, root, and stem. The war and the violence she witnessed had not dampened her recipes: these were, in fact, the only part of her mental luggage seemingly untouched, still beautiful and sweet. In her I was learning as much about my own ancestors’ story as I was about her life. There were the secrets of cuisines in diaspora: the seeds must come; the traumas of life are not more important than the celebrations; even in exile, one must follow the exacting instructions and preserve the stories around the food. All this keeps the motherland alive.
When it comes to the past, we have but little record of moments like these, when two or more cultures meet in the form of lay cooks. Even rarer are the moments when these meetings produce an unrestrained dialogue about cooking, identity, and all the rest: journeys, travails, pain, pleasure, and memory. We know these moments happen time and time again, but no one talks about them. Even as we record the birth of the great dishes we deem indigenous, our cultural memory fails us.
Yes, we have international events like Cook It Raw, where these collisions and collaborations are encouraged and celebrated. But what a drop in the bucket these are, compared to the long human history of moments in which the conquered and their conquerors meld their food cultures with each other. The true story of our most beloved global dishes lies in these moments, these exchanges, when the participants are not chefs and food journalists, but slaves, serfs, and overlords. Many of these events—when what’s cooking is the ferment between the minds of traditional cooks, brought together through trade and war, enslavement and oppression, exile and migration, and multicultural communal contact—are concealed in us as inconsequential exchanges. But they are the heart of cooking in a globalized food scene, and they must be recorded and rescued.
It is in these moments that we recognize what we have in common and what separates our worldviews. We need not fear exposing our national food characters to each other, for the ideas we share with each other constitute a boundless frontier. The dialogue of gastronomic interplay should be something we devote significant time to exploring, recording, and passing on. In my own work, dialogue focused on food has led to reconciliation and healing of past hurts and deep cultural divides. This dialogue is not a feel-good exercise; it is an assault on selective memory, amnesia, and any attempt to divorce food from its less pleasant contacts. Just as death happens, so does struggle and suffering: and these have been, for better or for worse, the prime movers of foods around the planet. Let us confront, let us collaborate, and let us cook.
More than ever, we are a global village: ideas, recipes, foods are unbound by space, and even by time. Even as we keep our unique selves and dishes, we are all winners in the story of food when our edible genealogies intertwine. It is not enough to have the final product; we need to mine the narratives that got us there. We are not too late: as we carry on cooking, there are more songs to capture, more details to remember, more recipes for burek stuffed with barbecue and beyond.