IJ’s newest Communications and Marketing Manager Tahnee Jackson sat down with Chef Nia Minard of Our Mother’s Kitchens to discuss the culinary lineages and stories that are going into the menu for 2022-23 Season kick-off event, Table Sessions: Solomon Temple.
Tahnee Jackson (TJ):
Could you tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind your culinary journey?
Chef Nia Minard (CN):
Although I was born in Philadelphia, I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, Yazoo City to be precise; and so Southern Mississippi, Delta Black cookery is like my sweet spot. That’s where my Mom’s from and where I grew up, so that's where my palate is rooted -- in Mississippi Delta Black foodways.
And my palate since coming back to Philly for college— when I graduated from Drexel [University] you know— I just fell in love. Philadelphia is a great food town. I draw a lot of inspiration from a Black Diasporic cuisine. I love a lot of Liberian and West African food, foods from the continent. I love tracing the threads of, for instance, why everywhere you go, wherever there are Black people, there's red rice—that obviously has its roots in jollof rice. You can look at Black-American cuisine and find its roots in African diasporic cuisine. That's really where my inspiration comes from. I basically start from where I'm from in the South and then branch out from there. And a lot of that journey has taken me to other foods like— I love a lot of Korean food, so I will incorporate a lot of techniques and recipes and cooking styles from Korean cuisine into my cooking.
For example, as much as I would love to have pork on the menu—cause I love pork—I know Black people in Philly don't eat pork. So I adapt a lot of my recipes—and yeah I can do the fancy Michelin star plating—but I really think there's something beautiful in cooking food that looks like food, and food that is presented as such, and is unpretentious and just delicious.
And you know, I kind of hate that idea that became very popular like, five, eight years ago of “elevating a dish.” To me one of the pieces or throughlines in the work that I do: I do a lot of research projects with food, and diasporic cuisine is just to state that we are enough. I'm affirming my Blackness to me and the larger world doing the work that I do through Black foodways and cookery. To me it doesn't need to be elevated, because it's already at the elevation. It's always sophisticated.
To me, there was a sophistication to the way that my grandmother would talk about how my great-grandmother was such a skilled chef that no matter what she was cooking, all her food was done at the same time! She just knew how to time and multitask and get everything done and out in a reasonable time. I teach culinary at Simon-Gratz High School and very much impress upon my students that the way I'm teaching you is not the only way to do it! The reason why I want to teach you, you know, don't use a fork to whisk eggs—even if that’s how you do it at home—is that we have access to professional tools, and you are in a career technical education program.
So I'm trying to get you to a level that if you choose to go to culinary school, or you choose to work in a kitchen at some point in your life or career, you have the language of the profession. So people take you seriously, which is something that is not always afforded to us and Brown and Black folk. Let’s at least know the rules, so we can break them, right? It's about setting that standard. It’s about preserving and creating identity.
I really try to tell the story of us you know, through food.
Chef Nia D. Minard (she/her) is a Philadelphia native and an educator with Our Mother's Kitchens — a food justice and storytelling collective centered around the culinary traditions of the African Diaspora as witnessed through the writings of seminal Black women authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.