There were people who called themselves cultural nationalists-and they were about African culture, and wearing African garments, and speaking Swahili,” she says. “It was a time of coming out of black power movements, black cultural identity movements. Harris allows that her work-or Iron Pots specifically-is in some ways a product of its era. "I read Marco Polo's diaries.”) They’re for cooking, for scholarship, and for entertainment all at once. (“Rather than go immediately to recipe, I went to research," she says. Her cookbooks are marked by a global perspective, a chatty tone, and a rigorous methodology. Four years later, Harris published the seminal Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking. While working as a teacher, Harris moonlighted as a journalist-she wrote about books, reviewed the theater, and maintained a travel column at Essence, which gave rise to her first work about food, Hot Stuff: A Cookbook in Praise of the Piquant. But prominence can be a particular trap: Do you wear being exceptional as point of pride or bear it as a kind of punishment? And she is most certainly a star in certain circles, having long enjoyed that prominence, having long been that one of a handful. Now near seventy, Harris has silvered hair, a stentorian voice, an understated laugh. Who made the first omelet? Who the hell knows? Noodles, pasta-is it China, is it Italy?
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