Bryant Terry “Blackifies” Fennel, and Ian Frazier Says Goodbye to 2020, in Verse

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bryant Terry is a chef, educator, food-justice activist, and cookbook author. He joined Helen Rosner virtually to cook a dish from his recent book, “Vegetable Kingdom”: citrus and garlic-herb braised fennel. The dish calls for marinating the bulb in mojo, a citrus-juice-based Cuban condiment more typically paired with meat. Terry says that he wants to “Blackify” fennel, as part of his project to “uplift” Black culinary traditions from the global African diaspora. Plus, Ian Frazier reads a poem written for the 2020 holiday season.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.9	Helen Rosner is a staff writer and a food expert for the New Yorker, and one of her favorite things to do is to get together with another pro,
0:21.2	another writer or a chef, and find some new things to cook. Now, that, of course, is getting a little
0:27.3	more complicated now. Okay, I'm going to get up to the funnel. I'm Helen Rosner. I'm a staff
0:36.3	writer at The New Yorker, and I am standing in my Brooklyn kitchen right now in front of a cutting board with a pile of fennel, parsley, vinegar, a couple of bags of plantain chips.
0:48.2	There's a lot of really cool, interesting stuff here in front of me, and the most important thing in front of me is my phone, which is
0:55.5	currently in the middle of a FaceTime call with the chef Bryant Terry.
0:59.7	Hey, Helen. Hey, how's it going? The author of the cookbook, Vegetable Kingdom, which came out this
1:04.8	year and which is one of my favorite books of the year. And we're going to make a recipe for,
1:10.3	in the book, it's citrus and garlic herb-raised
1:12.6	fennel. And Bryant is in his kitchen in Oakland, California. Hey, Bryant. Hey, Helen. I'm here in my
1:20.0	backyard in Oakland, ready to cook. Citrus. I don't know. Tell me what goes into this recipe.
1:27.2	It looks like there's, there's a couple of
1:29.3	different parts here. Yeah. So the cornerstone of the recipe is actually the moho, which is a
1:35.9	kind of citrus and garlic condiment or marinade that's using Cuban cooking, oftentimes
1:42.9	to marinate meat. And I thought that it would be fun to take
1:47.7	fennel bulbs and give them a nice sear to give them some color and a little crisp on the outside
1:53.4	and then baste them in this moho in a similar way that one might baste a turkey. Cool. So we should do
2:00.7	that part first, right?
2:01.5	We should make the sauce.
2:02.6	So, yeah, the sauce should be made first because you want to let it rest for an hour
	...

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