Probably only second in popularity to its annual music issue, Oxford American’s yearly food-focused edition is always highly anticipated among readers of the Arkansas-based magazine. For its 2021 issue, now available on newsstands or online, the publication has tapped acclaimed Nashville author and food expert Alice Randall as guest editor, and she has recruited some remarkable local contributors.
Randall introduces the issue with an essay dedicated to two noted food writers who died in the past year — Julia Reed and Randall Keenan — along with Marie Dutton Brown, a longtime literary agent who paved the way for many Black writers in the competitive world of publishing. Lokelani Alabanza, the owner of plant-based Nashville ice cream company Saturated, contributes a thoughtful essay opining that perhaps recipes should replace monuments as the proper way to bridge the past with the future. She also offers a recipe for toasted fenugreek and chocolate ice cream as an homage to a 6,000-year-old spice and chocolate, America’s favorite ice cream flavor.
Professor Amanda Little of Vanderbilt University has written a scathing account of how any discussion of reparations should include the concept of returning stolen farmland back to Black farmers, perhaps to reinvigorate a new generation of African American agriculturists. Randall’s daughter Caroline Randall Williams echoes that theme in a moving poem titled “A Sustainable Call and Response.” It's a powerful piece that throws a spotlight on terms like “farm-to-table” and “fresh produce” by reminding the reader of images of slavery and violence are associated with the history of those concepts. Beautiful in both structure and verse, it really is a remarkable work of poetry.
City House chef/owner Tandy Wilson opens up with a story of how restaurants occasionally send free food out to diners. This is a fairly common practice, but Wilson describes that it’s not always just a way to thank a frequent flyer or impress a visiting chef or food critic. Giving away food is a way to celebrate major events in people’s lives — weddings, births, No. 1 songs — but also as a way to console deaths, divorces and general downturns of fortune. Most of all, this sort of hospitality is just a way to share that chefs care about their customers. As a lovely little lagniappe, City House pastry chef Rebekah Turshen contributes her recipe for Sweet Potato Chess & Meringue Jar-Lid pies, a creative dessert born of the COVID necessity for individual servings of dessert, and also a nod to George Washington Carver and Nashville meat-and-three chess pies.
These Nashville contributors are just a small portion of the writers who helped Randall create this entertaining and thought-provoking issue, so hunt down a copy and feed your mind and soul!
