Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Criticism of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s groundbreaking 1970 cookbook, “Vibration Cooking,” needs still more attention to the role of Paris to the text. Smart-Grosvenor’s book describes her culinary roots in the southern US and her culinary journeys among diasporic Black culture. Smart-Grosvenor’s most formative travel was her time in Paris, where she experienced some of the city’s most politically and culturally tumultuous years. She joined flourishing Black artistic and intellectual communities of the time and was involved in the 1968 demonstrations advocating for social, political, and economic change. Change came through food, too; 1960s activism contributed to a shift in French culinary culture which promoted chefs’ autonomy and imagination. In her cookbook, Smart-Grosvenor argues both for individual creativity in food and a social/political activism grounded in cuisine; this revolution in cookery writing draws from—and transforms—her experience of Paris. Her connection of African American foodways to revisions of French culinary traditions emphasizes a larger point about the influence of African diasporic cuisine among transnational histories of food. To recognize fully how Smart-Grosvenor used her Parisian experience is to clarify her contribution to food history and the larger interpenetration of politics and food in the city’s postwar life. This points to other connections, in that time and place, of Black intellectual, activist, and artistic work with French cooking culture.