FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Chef Suzanne Barr’s comfort food is an orange fruit with big black seeds that thrives in South Florida back yards.
Ackee is soft and savory and takes on the flavor of whatever it’s cooked with. The trees are abundant in Jamaica, where Barr’s parents were born, and she grew up with a flourishing tree at her family’s home in Plantation, Florida.
Her new book, “My Ackee Tree: A Chef’s Memoir of Finding Home in the Kitchen,” details the primacy of the family’s tree in her culinary journey. She cooked in kitchens in New York, Hawaii and France before owning two restaurants in Toronto, Saturday Dinette and True True Diner, and now returning to live in Plantation. The Broward city, she says is “the place where my love of food originated,” where her father still supplies her with ackees from the beloved branches of her childhood.
“It’s a staple of Jamaican cooking,” Barr said. “It’s what my dad makes for my son, and what my mom made for me.”
Barr’s family moved to Plantation Acres 41 years ago, and was “one of the first Black families on the block,” Barr said. They planted the tree as an emblem of their homeland.
“The tree was our badge of honor,” Barr said. “It’s a very distinct tree that represents our culture.”
Barr, 45, remembers her mother, Eunice Adassa Facey, teaching her and her sister to open the ripened ackees and remove their shiny black seeds, and warning them not to open ackees that weren’t ripe because they can be toxic. Barr said her memoir, written with Suzanne Hancock and published by Penguin Random House, is a love letter to her mother, who died of pancreatic cancer when Barr was 25.
“I never got a chance to tell her I love my Jamaican roots,” she said.
Barr attended Nova Eisenhower Elementary and Nova Middle School in Davie before graduating from Nova High in 1995. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and later worked as an MTV production designer, but decided to attend cooking school after caring for her ailing mother, who had been comforted by the nourishing foods of the Caribbean as she battled cancer. She interned at a restaurant in Hawaii and worked private chef jobs in New York, then met her Australian husband in France before moving to Toronto to open and supervise two restaurants.
It all sounds glamorous, but home in Florida always beckoned.
“I had run my course,” Barr said. “I always crave places that connect me back to my roots. I wanted my son to know his grandfather.” Her son, Myles, is now 6 and attends elementary school in Plantation.
The memoir shares the scary moments of not knowing whether she’s on the right life path and the sensual moments of tasting new foods that alter the course of her culinary repertoire. There are boyfriends, bad landlords, pregnancies and subtle incidences of racism. At the end of the book, there are recipes that heed her Jamaican roots, including Chilled Coconut Soup with Lime Coconut Compote, Ackee Terrine with Whipped Coconut Salt Cod, Oxtail Patties, and Black Cake, a celebratory sweet filled with rum, rum-soaked fruit and topped with nutmeg whipped cream.
“Over the years, in many ways, I’ve felt my role as a Black woman operating in white spaces is for the most part a challenge,” Barr wrote. “The work I have to do to ‘fit in’ feels overwhelming at times. Smile. Get it done. Adjust myself to make others feel like they don’t have to adjust to me.”
Barr has decided to get more active in social causes, including growing the corps of Black chefs and placing vibrant restaurants in low-income communities.
“I started to see myself as a change-maker as much as a chef,” she wrote.
Now back in Plantation, she is consulting on a new restaurant in Miami, developing recipes for Chatelaine Magazine and starting a product line (Suzanne Barr Food, which will include her own root vegetable chips and sauces).
“I ran from Florida,” Barr said. “But Florida is a place I always come back to. Every Jamaican I know works six or seven jobs. This book is just the beginning.”
