Pascale Boucicaut is a culinary artist and foodways historian of Haitian descent. She was born on the island of Jamaica and grew up inside kitchens in and around Boston, New York, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Pascale has been working with food since she first learned that there are secrets, histories, and stories that can only be told in the kitchen. Since then she has been busy resuscitating traditional cooking methods and ingredients, which are endangered or already obsolete, in order to promote the dynamic cultures, physical health, and spiritual wellbeing of our diverse communities around the world. 

Currently, Pascale is working on Dishes of the Diaspora, a culinary archive project supported by the Leeway Foundation and on display at the Philadelphia Folklore Project. She produces this project in collaboration with photographer Adachi Pimentel. She is also the culinary artist and co-founder of Paloma, a monthly Caribbean-inspired supper club she started with folklorist Selina Morales. And she is working towards opening a new cafe in the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of an expansive and collaborative exhibition, entitled Philadelphia Assembled. This fall, Pascale will take her research to the University of California at Berkeley, where she’ll begin her exploration of African Heritage foodways through the fields of folklore and archaeology. 

Some of the menus items Pascale loves to serve include chiktay moru (Haitian salt cod salad with sweet and spicy peppers), jerk pork with yellow corn arepas, and coconut tres leches cake for dessert, to name just a few. 

“Our memories rose and settled with the pots and pans, around the kitchen bar,” writes Regina Bradley in the Southern Foodways Alliance Winter 2016 edition of “Gravy,” original stories from the South. In “Sop it Dry: How to Make Country Black Girl Magic,” Bradley, an English professor at Armstrong State University, paints a vivid portrait of growing up on the southside of Albany, Georgia on Hardup Road. Central to her childhood recollections is her time spent in the kitchen watching her grandmother make “jailhouse cornbread”—a dish whose sum is more than its few humble ingredients in that it “symbolized the strength to keep going.”  

We've also enjoyed a recent Q&A between culinary historian Michael Twitty and Chef/Storyteller Shawanda Marie. Marie speaks about Creole culture, how it inspires her culinary outlook, and Hurricane Katrina’s impact on today’s New Orleans cuisine. She shares the secrets to making a perfect creamy pot of red beans and lets you know what NOT to put in your gumbo and po’ boy if you are looking for the true taste of New Orleans. Chef Shawanda also imparts important lessons her grandmother taught her about making food more pleasing to the eye. To find out more about Chef Shawanda, check her out at the New Orleans Creole Story Pot.

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