Kwame Onwuachi Is Putting African Diasporic Cuisines in Conversation

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“Diasporic cuisine,” writes Onwuachi, is “a writhing, thriving, living thing.” In this cookbook, he considers the connections between the food traditions of Louisiana, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and New York. All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our […]

Click here to view original web page at www.epicurious.com

“Diasporic cuisine,” writes Onwuachi, is “a writhing, thriving, living thing.” In this cookbook, he considers the connections between the food traditions of Louisiana, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and New York.

A hard copy of 'My America Recipes from a Young Black Chef' by Kwame Onwuachi.

All products featured on Epicurious are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

When I started teaching food writing courses a decade ago, I spent countless summers in search of published work by Black food writers to add to my reading list. This led to many dead ends and often a sense of hopelessness. But then, during the summer of 2020, a friend sent me Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir. It was the voice I had long hoped for—a young, relatable Black voice telling important stories about food. And once I learned that, like me, Onwuachi had roots in Nigeria and wanted to explore his heritage by putting his own touch on his ancestors’ recipes, I instantly became a fan.

Earlier this year, I heard that Onwuachi was working on his first cookbook—My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef. I preordered a copy, and when it arrived on publication day, I immediately noticed its physical similarity to Onwuachi’s memoir. Both covers welcome readers with a black, all-caps, chicken-scratch font on a white backdrop. Both sport the same red, black, and white color scheme. And both include images of Onwuachi—tattooed arms on display, hands out and ready to throw down in the kitchen. Fans of Onwuachi’s memoir will also appreciate the familiar authorial voice in My America. The writing is at once honest and knowing. “It should go without saying that I reserve the right to cook whatever I please,” he writes in his introduction. “At the same time, for me personally, venerating my ancestors by keeping their recipes alive has become even more meaningful.”

What follows is a delicious globe-spanning cookbook, interwoven with personal essays that tell of Onwuachi’s travels to the lands of his ancestors: Louisiana, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and New York. One of the things that I like most about the cookbook, though, is that it is not organized based on these locations. Rather, each of the book’s sections—Pantry, Rice, Greens and Other Vegetables, Legumes and Tubers, Seafood and Shellfish, Poultry, Meat, and Bread, Pastries and Desserts—includes an assortment of recipes from across Onwuachi’s heritages, allowing the cuisines to converse and share space together. This structure fully embodies the epiphany Onwuachi describes in his introduction, brought on by his travels and experiences in the kitchen: “I began to see just how interconnected these diasporic cuisines are. They are not islands but part of the same river. I saw diasporic cuisine as a writhing, thriving, living thing.”

This diasporic conversation can be seen in the chapter on rice, for example, where one page spotlights a recipe for Carolina Gold rice from the American South, the next offers a recipe for rice and peas from Jamaica, and a few pages later is a recipe for jollof rice, one of the most well-known dishes of Nigerian cuisine. The dishes feel quite natural next to each other, like cousins gathering at a family reunion.

I was most excited to try Onwuachi’s take on the traditional Nigerian dishes I grew up with. So, I set out to try his recipe for chin chin, which he describes as “nutmeg-riddled fried puffs of dough, the Nigerian contribution to filling mankind’s desire for crunchy, sweet snacks.” Growing up in California, I always anticipated the holiday season because that was when my father was able to pause from his busy work schedule to prepare a special dish for my siblings and me. If we were lucky, this meant a fresh batch of chin chin would be ready to pop into our desirous mouths in no time. To my surprise and joy, Onwuachi’s version of the bite-size Nigerian treat tastes nearly identical to the one I grew up with—the familiar, warm taste of nutmeg taking me back to the winters of my youth.

I was equally excited to try Onwuachi’s version of my all-time favorite dish: sweet plantains. Fried plantain is an internationally cherished dish with fans across the African diaspora and beyond. It requires nothing more than frying slices of the very ripe starchy fruit in bubbling hot oil with a bit of salt, but I was curious to try it alongside Onwuachi’s recipe for avocado crema, which he describes as “a touch of acidity that complements the sweetness of the plantain.” The verdict? Though I prefer eating my fried plantain alongside other hot dishes such as scrambled eggs or black beans and rice, Onwuachi’s crema offers a refreshing dip that would fare well for a summer picnic or barbecue.

Fried sweet plantains in a blue serving bowl.

It dawned on me while reading My America that most of the Nigerian dishes I grew up loving are desserts. So I had to give one more of my favorites a try: puff puff. Onwuachi notes that the dish is “West Africa’s most popular form of fried dough.” And his take will have fans of the street snack waxing nostalgic. The technique of dropping the balls of fried dough into boiling hot oil and then sprinkling them immediately with cinnamon sugar is easy to follow, and the final taste offers a perfect mix of pillowy softness on the inside and fried crunch on the outside.

For readers with roots or interest in the cuisines of the African diaspora, Onwuachi’s cookbook is at once a nostalgic taste of home and a reminder that we’re a part of a larger global community. It deserves an easy-to-reach spot on every home cook’s bookshelf.