Peach & Pecan Clafoutis
Recipe reprinted with permission from Tanya Holland’s California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West (Ten Speed Press, 2022). Photographs by Aubrie Pick.
A clafoutis (cluh-FOO-tee) is a cros...
Tanya Holland’s California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West
(TEN SPEED PRESS, 2022) Photographs By Aubrey Pick
We were going to write our own introduction to this excerpt and recipe from Tanya Holland’s California Soul, but who could say it better than Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker, who penned this beautiful foreword to the book…
California Soul is the most beautiful cookbook I’ve ever read. Or seen. It is an unusually moving read, just for the stories, before you even get to a serious consideration of the food. Like any great book that is steeped in the love of its characters, California Soul is instructive and at the same time remarkably moving. Reading it I was constantly thinking: I may never make these great dishes, but I will reread this cookbook for years to come, for the stories of incredible gutsy, resourceful, intrepid, Black people who not only came West to California from the South to begin new lives, but continued living lives of bravery, will, creativity, and inspiration for generations, following their initial arrival here, and continuing to this day.
The photographs—of landscape, food, and people—are as compelling as the narrative. Evocative flowers, orchards, fields. The faces of people! So honest. So simple. So true. It is as if the Black people in this book represent a basic character: that of honesty, steadfastness, determination, and . . . satisfaction. Each person, whether date farmer or apple grower, has chosen the path suited to herself or himself, has moved heaven and earth to fulfill a dream of growing food that will sustain others as well as themselves, and has achieved the peace of soul that comes from knowing one’s self to be both irreplaceable, sui generis, and secure in one’s own dream of what an abundant life can be.
Then there are the recipes. Wondrous creations, all. Each recipe is offered with a loving clarity that makes the reader hungry to try to make such a dish herself. Each recipe a creation of gustatory genius. Each recipe marvelous in its unexpected, often unusual, mixture of ingredients and inspiration. Almost every recipe connects us to hundreds of years and generations of Black people, in our families and communities, who did for us whatever they could to make us realize we were loved. This so often involved offering us the best taste of their love through their food.
It will be a challenge to read this cookbook without shedding a tear. It is that radical. That profound. And it is so us! Whoever thought there’d be a cookbook some day that left us sobbing!? With thanksgiving. For it says: We have been fed all along by people who loved us. People who offered us the best, most creative offerings that they had. And generation after generation they never failed to remember to feed us well. With spirituality, with creativity, with dance, with prayer, song, and the foundation of all of these things: unforgettable food presented by great cooks and chefs who are grateful to acknowledge, cherish, and lift up the ancestors, by being exactly who they are. —Alice Walker
Excerpt from TANYA HOLLAND’S CALIFORNIA SOUL: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West (Ten Speed Press, 2022)
JUNETEENTH
For the first time in 2021, Juneteenth was celebrated as a federal holiday. It commemorates the day in 1865 that Major General Gordon Granger brought the news of freedom to the enslaved communities in the former Confederate stronghold of Galveston, Texas. Accompanied by US troops, Granger announced General Order No. 3, which stated in no uncertain terms that “all slaves are free.”
This was nearly three years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and less than two months after the end of the Civil War. Notifying the slave community that its members were free was the responsibility of their masters, who kept hundreds of thousands of African Americans enslaved beyond the end of the war.
On June 19, 1866, exactly one year after the news made it to Galveston, Juneteenth was born. The name is a mix of two words, June and nineteenth, and it has been commemorated for more than 150 years. Celebrated with parades, barbecues, dances, and the singing of spirituals, the holiday quickly became a yearly occasion to feast with family and loved ones.
Across the country, other emancipation days were similarly celebrated with cookouts and music. Some are called Jubilee Day or Freedom Day, but Juneteenth, while nationally significant, was more popular in Texas and the surrounding states. The holiday spread westward with the Great Migration, becoming part of California’s culture.
Juneteenth also brings specific culinary traditions to the table. Texas-style barbecue traveled west and became central to Juneteenth celebrations. Known for dry rubs and smoked meats like beef brisket, this distinct style moved seamlessly into African American-owned restaurants in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Sacramento.
Most Juneteenth menus include barbecued meats, red beans and rice, collards, cornbread, watermelon, red drinks (strawberry, hibiscus, or lemonade), cobblers, and of course some red velvet cake. Red is significant as this color of dye was reserved for the wealthy during slavery. Using it in these foods represented the upward mobility of newly freed people and their ability to eat what they wanted. It’s a holiday that celebrates not just the end of chattel slavery, but also the beautiful cuisines of Africans in America. Neighborhood cookouts, church gatherings, parades, music, dancing, and family barbecues are all part of these traditions.
Texas was the first state to formally recognize Juneteenth in 1980, and California adopted it in 2003. The holiday continues to bring people together through food. Over the past several decades, activists have advocated for Juneteenth to be a federal holiday. One woman in particular made sure it happened. In 2016, Ms. Opal Lee, then an eighty-nine-year-old activist, walked from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, DC, to lobby for a federal Juneteenth holiday. Lee is known as “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” and her efforts were recognized by President Joe Biden’s administration during the signing of the declaration on June 17, 2021.
While the holiday has been observed in Black communities for decades, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests brought Juneteenth into mainstream consciousness.
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