After swearing to his Nana at 18 he'd never return, spending a decade in the military then graduating from culinary school, Gullah Geechee chefarmer Matthew Raiford found himself right back on his family's farm. For this week's Genius Session, Matthew shares with Kristen why that decision was a no-brainer.
As someone who has tried (and oftentimes failed) to record and preserve her own family recipes, Kristen really connected with chefarmer-turned-author Matthew Raiford's mission to document the dishes and stories from his. For this week's Genius Session, Kristen goes behind the scenes with Matthew, as he shares his process of writing Bress 'n' Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer.
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Kristen Miglore: Hi, I'm Kristen. Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For a decade. I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves. This week. I had the pleasure of talking with Matthew Rayford, the James Beard-nominated chef, or chef farmer as he says, behind the cookbook, Bress 'n' Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer. This book is full of stunning recipes, like two-day fried chicken and buttermilk griddle cakes with Muscatine jelly. And we will talk about plenty of those in this episode, but I think I might have loved reading Matthew's stories even more. Because he and his family have been stewards of their land since his great-great-great-grandfather, Jupiter Gillyard established the farm in 1870. and Matthew swore at 18 years old that he was never going to come back to the south. Still, after spending a decade in the military and then going to culinary school at the CIA and living and working worldwide, he found himself drawn back to the farm. Now, I am someone who has tried and sometimes failed to record and preserve my family recipes. So I connected with Matthew's mission to document the dishes and stories from him. And also make space for the history that is unfolding right now on the farm. Here is Matthew for more,
Matthew Raiford: I grew up working inside of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. So I worked. Yeah, that is a thing whoever's listening, Piggly Wiggly, That's still a thing. I grew up inside a grocery store, but the produce section wasn't as big as now. Everybody who went to the store grew tomatoes and cucumbers; some grew this, and the third. And we didn't go to the grocery store to buy many vegetables. Because it was all being grown. And so it wasn't until I was well past the age of 18 that I started to realize like, wow, everybody goes to the grocery store to buy all their food. I just didn't know. People went to the grocery to buy dry and canned foods, not everything they ate.
And so now, fast forward to where we are now, I realize that I grew up with a unique food system. I grew up eating fresh peas and corn, not sitting inside the grocery store. I'm talking about cracking the corn off the stalk and like to roast it. Break it off the stem and put it into a crab boil. Crack it off the branch and boil it with some fresh butter. So I grew up eating like that and then realizing that I could help control a better food system. Coming home was a no-brainer. When the opportunity presented itself, it was terrific for my Nana to say, what will we do with all this land? And I jumped in and looked at my sister and felt that overwhelming sensation. The ancestors came over to me, and I said, Hey, you know what? We should go back to farming. And I haven't stopped since what
Kristen: What led you to write this book? And what was the story You wanted to tell about Gullah Geechee food?
Matthew: That's a big question. The first thing is I want to write a cookbook about a sense of place where I came from, what it was like for me to be of African descent and being raised in the Deep South. And I also want to make sure that people understand that food from the African diaspora is not a monolith. that it's ever-changing, It's ever-moving based on the place you end up. And that is what Gullah Geechee food is also. It’s interesting, I always tell people, like I didn't grow up eating shrimp and. However, I did grow up eating fried fish with stewed okra and tomatoes over grits for dinner. When you look at my recipes, they are from my part of the diaspora; not anyone else's per se. And I also wanted to show that Gullah Geechee food is also part of the comfort foods we eat across the United States. We call our comfort food that there's not a major city in the United States that is not trying to have the best Southern restaurant around. That has been a trend that has been ongoing for almost twenty years now. It's like no other trend. Many food trends have come and gone, but when it comes to comfort food. Think about how many biscuit places popped up. And people always consider biscuits to be country. People want to feel some sort of comfort, and food is one of the ways to do it.
And then having the foods of your Grandma, your Nana, your auntie, or your uncle, whoever in your family grilled, barbecue, baked. People want that in their lives more now than ever before because we need to feel some sort of comfort. The book came out this year, but I wrote the book a year before that. And then there were almost two years of me putting everything together and sitting down with the writer, Amy, and making sure my voice carried through the book. So this was not like a, for lack of better terms, an overnight thing where I woke up one morning, stroked it all out on paper, typed it out, sent it off, and someone said, great book, let’s do it! It's a process, and it takes time. And so that's what I wanted Bress 'n' Nyam to be about, which, in Gullah Geechee, means bless and eat. And I wanted the book to be a blessing to anyone that read it. I wanted people to eat from the book, and I wanted people to take in those stories inspired by.
Kristen: You have learned how to cook from so many different resources over your career. Your family, the culinary school, a chef in restaurants, and now farming and exploring your family's archives. I would love to hear about any of those aha moments that stand out in your memory. Moments that have changed the way you cook, either from early in your career or even recently,
Matthew: Many people changed their eating habits, meat being the main component of everything they cook. And I remember the very first time I made collard greens with no meat, and no one knew it. It all came from me trying to figure out the smokiness level that smoked meats gave, whether it be smoked Turkey or smoked ham hocks or smoked neck bones, whatever anyone might happen to use. And when I first started doing it, it was like, oh, put it in some smoked paprika. That should do it. And it was still not smoky enough. Smoked meats give any food a pronounced deep smoke flavor. In these dishes with smoked meats, they are the side to the vegetable. I started using Montreal steak seasoning and the steak seasoning itself. When you grind it, the volatile oils inside become more pronounced than the steak seasoning when you don’t grind it. And so, the very first time, I traditionally used Montreal steak seasoning with some apple cider vinegar and roasted garlic and caramelized onions. So that I could get that additional level of sweetness and a bite that I was looking for. And from that, I started understanding what smoked salts would do. And so I started combining and using those types of things and not just smoked paprika or even chili powder to get to that smoky flavor. When I began incorporating those ingredients to make food, they got that smoky meat taste without using meat. It is a fantastic thing.
Also, learning to understand how to use fresh and dried herbs is so important. What happens when you take them and do some of the same things, get those oils moving that are in or in place and get them incorporated into your dish. I've been using lots of culantro and many dishes to have this next-level herbaceousness. When you think about it's one of the primary ingredients in sofrito. It imparts not a cilantro taste per se. To me, it imparts more of a herbaceousness that is more top of the tongue as compared to cilantro. I hear many people say that they don't like cilantro because of its soapiness. And I've had people be like, I don’t even like cilantro, but this is so good! And I was like, well good, because it's not in there. So I think those two ways of learning how to manipulate food and flavor have been my most significant genius points—always trying to look at food in a different light.
Kristen (voiceover): Hey, it's Kristen. If you enjoy this chat with Matthew as much as I did, head over to The Genius Recipe Tapes, and hit subscribe. So you don't miss out on other stories like this one and like our recent conversation with the host of the smart mouth podcast, Katherine Spiers, about breaking news in Girl Scout cookies and her favorite rule-defying baking tips. In the second half of this episode, we get to hear about more deliciousness from Matthew. Molasses pound cake, grilled watermelon, and oysters on the hot tin, to name a few. And how he decided what belonged in his cookbook, Bress 'n' Nyam. Meet you back here for that.
Kristen: The chapters are broken up by the earth, water, wind, fire, nectar, and spirits. Why did you want to break it up that way? And I'm curious if you have a favorite recipe. I know it's many chapters to go through, but if you have a favorite recipe that you feel embodies each of those chapters, that will help us understand them.
Matthew: I think my favorite still is Effie's Molasses Pound Cake, which is my mom's pound cake recipe that she ended up making because she ran out of white sugar and had some brown sugar. She decided not to go to the store for white sugar but just to use brown sugar and molasses. So that is one of my favorites.
Kristen: What is the cake’s texture?
Matthew: And it’s still pound cake, but you can taste the unrefined sugar. It's denser than a regular pound cake, but it has that molasses sweetness to it. So if you can imagine, that burnt but chocolatey flavor.
Kristen: Do you put anything on it or eat it with something?
Matthew: I would put like a blueberry glaze on the top of it, which sends it into another realm and, or Southern huckleberries, which are the precursor to the blueberry cooked down the, if you were up north, I would do like a Lingonberry jam. That would be amazing or some blackberries. And if you want to do it during the earlier part of the year, I would say a strawberry syrup. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. In the fire chapter. I think the whole hog is my favorite because when you see the pictures of it inside of the book. It invokes the time of year. And back in the day, our hog-killing time was mainly in November. And then we dig this vast pit. And put down a piece of metal and cover it and let it cook over those coals overnight. And then, the following day, we open it up and let it finish.
I have a two-day marinated chicken that's inside of that area of the book. And what's interesting is my conversation about the fact that you wouldn't just fry a chicken back in the day. A chicken gives you an egg every day. So that's a protein source every day. So you wouldn't just go out and go and say, oh, you know what, tonight, we're going to have chicken where a family of four, eight pieces of chicken is not enough. You need at least two, three chickens. You're not going to get rid of a protein source that's giving you an egg every day. So what usually would be as an older hand, and because it was an old hand or an old Biddy, as they used to call them, you would have to get that marinade so that meat would break down in the buttermilk and the hot sauce and all those kinds of things. And then let's see, what have I missed? Oh, the water voices on the hot tin are an old-school way to cook oysters where you create a significant heat source under the tin. You put all your washed oysters on the top and throw a wet Crocus sack or burlap sack over the top. And then, as they would pop, they're ready. You barely have to use your waster knife to open them up. The briny, salty flavor is still there.
Kristen: And the sack on top helps them steam?
Matthew: Yes. They, it helps them steam, and it still leaves them super plump on the inside. So instead of sitting in them on a grill and then having to do all the like hardcore shucking, you do that, and the lips of the oyster pop open, and they're ready. The Earth chapter for me. I love roasted vegetables, but I think what I love is the grilled watermelon salad with the sangria vinaigrette. People always tell me that they would have never thought to grill watermelon. And I said, well, think about the juiciness, the sugars that are in watermelon. One of the reasons we like grilled foods is because we want that char. So when you char the outside of a watermelon a little bit and add that same gill marks. And the sangria vinaigrette is leftover wine, acid, and olive oil. Plus, with the heirloom tomato, it's perfect.
Kristen: Wow. So what happens to the flavor of the watermelon when you grill it?
Matthew: So the old school thing is putting salt on watermelon. And I ask people why they do that, and they answer that it makes it sweeter. Yes, because salt is a flavor enhancer. So if you put a little bit of salt, even on an apple, when you bite into it, it's going to be twice as sweet or twice as tart, depending on what apple you have. The same thing happens when you grill it. The sugars that are in it get intensified because of that serious amount of heat. That is what happens to the watermelon; the intensity of the sugars amplifies when grilled.
Kristen: I’m getting out the grill this week; I’m curious how you decided on the balance of these recipes? How many are from your family versus how your work and travels inspire you?
Matthew: I tried to balance that out by also thinking about the sense of place, like where we are as a community. Where we like old things, but we also like spins on old things. And then when we like brand new stuff. So what I did was I tried to break it into like thirds to where it was like a third of things that came, directly from family recipes. And then a third of something that was like my take on something like a family recipe. And then a third is brand new, like my remix on watermelon salad. Grilled watermelon would be nice with heirloom tomatoes. So you've got the acid from those heirloom tomatoes. You got the sweetness from the watermelon; you have some nice little bit of microgreens, whether radish or broccoli or kale or whatever. And then you got all those flavors melding that is a more modern thought process to put a recipe together. So that's how I ended up getting to where we were or where we are at this point. That was super fun—for example, my grandpa Arthur’s candied yams recipe. I had to call all the family for specifics. I called my sister one time, asking if she remembered if he had put the sugar in now or later. Or whether he put the lemonade in there or was it orange. I was having all those conversations. I talked to my mom, I spoke to my cousins. I asked lots of questions like, do you remember, did it have this taste? Because my grandfather had already passed, I couldn’t ask him. I made his candied yams for years and had put my creative spin on them. But I felt like I was putting them in the book. I had to get it as close. I felt like I had a complete creative license when I was doing it. But when I put it in the book, I felt like I needed to get as much input from the family as possible. So there was also some of those things too, where I was like, Ugh, got to make it right.
Kristen: It sounds so rewarding to have the excuse to talk about that with each of your family members. To triangulate and get the whole picture of it.
Matthew: Yes! It was like me trying to figure out the past, present, and future. And it became one big mashup in the book.
Kristen (voiceover): Thanks for listening. And thank you to Matthew Rayford, sixth-generation farmer, chef, and author of the cookbook, Bress 'n' Nyam. And by the way, Matthew has new projects in the works. He's working on a second cookbook and a children's cookbook, and he's producing Gullah Geechee gin and some other spirits to embrace all of the things you can produce and distill from the farm. His wife, Tia, and his sister Alfia are starting a butchery program in 2022, reflecting the history of women-led butchering on their farm and in their community. This week's show was put together by Coral Lee, Amy Shuster, Ben, and Emily Hanhan. If you have a Genius Recipe that reminds you of home past, present, or future, I would always love to hear from you at genius@food52.com. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes and the Food52 Podcast network, the very best thing that you can do to support us is to take a moment to leave us a rating or review, or send this episode to a Montreal steak seasoning fan in your life. Thank you so much. Talk to you next week.