Maya Angelou welcomes readers to her table, childhood
By Joan Brunskill
Associated Press
All her life, it seems as she looks back, writer and poet Maya
Angelou has had an enviably acute awareness of food and cooking
as a dimension of experience.
Her new book, “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table” (Random
House, $29.95), makes clear the links she remembers between certain
tastes, dishes and meals, and the intense emotions of the unforgettable
occasions that were their context.
The book, subtitled “A Lifetime of Memories With Recipes,” is
much more than a cookbook — but it’s that too, the
recipes paired with the perceptive vignettes, sometimes funny,
sometimes touching, that themselves are a feast.
“I’ve long known that food features in our lives so
much more dominantly than we realize,” Angelou said in a
recent interview, on a visit to New York. “Food can be used
to pacify, to enrage, to court, to uplift.”
Later that day at a book signing, she reminded her laughing
bookstore audience that food can be used to woo — “When
a person says ‘I want to take you to dinner,’ it’s
not always about dinner.”
Angelou, 76, lives in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her book takes readers
back to her early childhood in Stamps, Ark., already learning
how love and comfort can be inseparable from the food that nurturing
people cook.
Later, she learned to cook that way for others, in the course
of a life that’s taken her far from her birthplace, as a
performer, educator, civil-rights activist, producer and director,
as well as a much-honored writer. And, yes, when she needed the
job, working as a cook.
Angelou didn’t keep notes along the way, she said, because “I
have a really rather queer memory,” which she relates to
several years in her childhood when she did not speak.
Chapters in “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table” touch
on various periods of her life, starting with those early years
when she already savored the good food at the family table, then
beyond to places that included San Francisco, Paris and London.
For all its narrative flow, the book didn’t always come
easily, Angelou said. “I wrote about 35 or 40 pages, and
then the book suddenly stopped, sat down like a mule and wouldn’t
be goaded or enticed forward.”
About a year later, she was visiting the photographer Brian
Lanker whose work illustrates the book, and when he heard about
the block, Angelou recalled, “he said. ‘You need photographs!’”
Angelou was hesitant to ask him to come and do them, “but
he said he’d do it in a heartbeat, and the photos led me
back into the story,” she said.
She cooked all the dishes for the photographs in eight or nine
days, two or three dishes a day, when the photographer and his
assistant came down to her home in North Carolina. “He had
to photograph them in about 20 minutes, because we were to eat
the food for dinner and we could not let the dishes spoil,” she
said.
Her first choice of a recipe for readers to try is the cold
potato salad, linked in the book to a sharply told, uncomfortable
episode of greed, with an ending warmed by her grandmother’s
wisdom.
Another extraordinary moment is paired with the recipe for red
rice, a dish that evokes an occasion after a memorable meal when
her mother spoke words of unexpected encouragement on a street
in San Francisco.
Will there be another cookbook-memoir?
“I thought I had finished,” she replied, “but
then I realized I have that many stories again” — so
it seems there might be.
