PITTSBURGH — Alexander Smalls was a professional opera singer before he reinvented himself as a chef and restaurateur. So it's no surprise he brings an artist's eye to the recipes he created for his 2020 cookbook, "Meals, Music, And Muses: Recipes From my African American Kitchen" (Flatiron, $35).
He brings a pretty good ear to the Southern dishes featured in the book, by offering a "soundtrack" of the bold and flavorful Gullah Geechee foods he grew up eating and learned to cook in Spartanburg, South Carolina — some of which were featured at the Declaration & Resistance dinner he curated April 23 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art to celebrate an exhibition of Baltimore artist Stephen Towns.
Each chapter pays homage to a genre of music tied to a category of food. Starters, for instance, are likened to the improvisation, blues and swing found in jazz while rice, pasta and grits — "lean on me" dishes that are often the backbone of a home cook's repertoire — represent the comfort of spirituals.
