Vertamae Grosvenor

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (April 4, 1937 – September 3, 2016) was an American culinary anthropologist, griot, poet, food writer, and broadcaster on public media. Born into a Gullah family in the Low Country of South Carolina, she moved with them as a child to Philadelphia during the Great Migration. Later she lived in Paris before settling in New York City. She was active in the Black Arts Movement and performed on Broadway.

Her travels informed her cooking and appreciation of food as culture. She was known for her cookbook-memoir, Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970), and published numerous essays and articles. She produced two award-winning documentaries and was a commentator for years on NPR, serving as a contributor to its NOW series.

Grosvenor also appeared in several films, including Personal Problems (1980), an independent film by Bill Gunn, Daughters of the Dust (1992), about a Gullah family in 1902 during a time of transition on the Sea Islands, and Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel of the same name. She was in a National Geographic documentary about the Gullah people.

Early life and education Vertamae Smart was born in 1937 as a pre-mature twin; her twin brother died at birth. She was raised in Hampton County, South Carolina, in the Low Country. She grew up speaking Gullah, as her parents' families had been in the area for centuries and were part of that ethnic group and culture. In this area, Africans were concentrated in large populations on relatively isolated Sea Island plantations and in the Low Country; they developed a unique creole culture and language with strong ties to Africa.

Smart grew up on Low Country cuisine. She recounted her paternal grandmother Estella Smart's way with oysters in her first cookbook, published in 1970. Recognizing common practices between contemporary African cooking and that of Low Country African Americans, she became interested in food and cooking as expressions of culture.

When she was about eight, her family moved from the Gullah Geechee Corridor in the Low Country to Philadelphia. She lived there through her teenage years and, as a latchkey kid and an only child, she "had lots of time to experiment with cooking." "I would use up all the food experimenting and she [my mother] would never fuss," writes Grosvenor in Vibration Cooking. "I now realize how uptight it must have put her cause we were so poor and every bit of food counted."

In Paris, she met Bob Grosvenor, whom she later married. After she was told by a friend that there was a store that "sold frozen lion's tails and elephant tails with green peas," one of her hobbies in Paris was looking for "unusual food stores."

Broadcasting Grosvenor was a long-time contributor to public broadcasting in the United States. She was a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and a regular contributor to NPR's Cultural Desk. Early notable programs were her documentaries Slave Voices: Things Past Telling (1983), and Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon, which earned her a Robert F. Kennedy Award and an Ohio State Award.

From 1988 to 1995, she was the host of NPR's documentary series Horizons. Her work there included AIDS and Black America: Breaking the Silence on the AIDS crisis in the United States, which won two awards, a duPont-Columbia Award and an Ohio State Award, in 1990. She also produced a program on connections between indigenous people of South Africa and African Americans, South Africa and the African-American Experience. and The Americas' Family Kitchen on PBS, which led to a television spinoff called Vertamae Cooks. The recipes are often introduced via an instance in which that particular meal was eaten, or via a person who gave Grosvenor the recipe. In addition to recipes for food, Grosvenor also includes recipes and guidance for cocktails and other drinks, herbal teas, use of spices and herbs, and poultices and home remedies. The recipes pay homage to Grosvenor's own cultural roots in Geechee (or Gullah) culture and Lowcountry cuisine.

Her intention was both a creative project and to debunk and demystify perceptions of African-American food: "I wanted to tell stories about the gatherings, the people, the food, and the history of the food. For decades the history of African-American food was mucked up. "Soul food," aka black folks' eats, was said to have developed out of master's leftovers ... Education is the key."

She does not consider herself a soul food writer. In the introduction to the book's 1986 edition, Grosvenor writes:

My feeling was/is any Veau à la Flamande or Blinchishe's Tvorogom I prepared was as 'soulful' as a pair of candied yams. I don't have culinary limitations because I'm 'black.' On the other hand, I choose to write about 'Afro-American' cookery because I'm 'black' and know the wonderful, fascinating culinary history there is. And because the Afro-American cook has been so underappreciated."

The book addresses gentrification of cuisine and the classification as "gourmet" of foods that have long been a part of African-American cookery, such as collards and terrapins. In the recipe for terrapins, Grosvenor writes,

Ain't nothing but swamp turtles. They used to be plentiful on the eastern seaboard. So plentiful that plantation owners gave them to their slaves. Now they are the rare discovery of so-called gore-mays. White folks always discovering something…after we give it up. By the time they got to the bugaloo, we were doing the 'tighten up.' By the time they got to pigs' feet, black people were giving up swine.

Personal life Smart married Bob Grosvenor. They had a daughter, Kali Grosvenor, in 1960, Grosvenor and Kali published for the first time simultaneously: In 1969, Marie D. Brown, a Doubleday employee received Kali's poetry manuscript and Smart-Grosvenor's cookbook notes and decided to publish both pieces. The following year, in 1970, when Kali was nine, Doubleday published both Poems by Kali and Vibration Cooking.

Death After suffering an aneurysm in 2009, Smart-Growsvenor spent her days in Palm Key, South Carolina, a private island near her birth town. Smart-Grosvenor died of natural causes on September 3, 2016, in the Bronx, NY, at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. Ohio State Award for Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon (1990) Honorary doctorate ("Doctor of Humane Letters") from the University of New Hampshire (1998)