In Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s 1970 classic, liberation went hand in hand with intuition
There are a lot of terms for thoughtful cooking: “intuition,” “Old World,” “cooking with love.” Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s was the best. She called it “vibration cooking.”
This was also the title of her first cookbook, published in 1970, and she describes vibration cooking in the book’s second, very often quoted paragraph: “And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.” She encourages her readers to follow their own tastes and instincts: “Do your thing your way. The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your business. I don’t like to get in people’s business.”
Grosvenor was so attuned to the vibrations of her own cooking that she could tell if fried chicken was done by the sound of the grease in the pan. To her, it was music.
She could do the same thing with rice, which made sense. Born in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Grosvenor had been cooking rice all her life. Her people ate it with almost every meal. Grosvenor’s first language was Gullah, a blend of English and the West African languages enslaved people had spoken when they first arrived in America; later, after she’d become an anthropologist (one of her many intersecting and coexisting careers), she suspected that the name derived from the word “Angola.”
Grosvenor’s people were also called Gullah. That was the polite term. The less-polite term was “Geechee.” When Grosvenor was growing up, it was considered akin to a racial slur. But as an adult, she decided to reclaim it: the full title of her book is Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. As it implies, this is both a cookbook and a collection of stories from Grosvenor’s life. It’s also a protest, from the very first line where Grosvenor points out that white cooks borrow food from people all over the world — except for Black people.
“White people act like they invented food and like there is some weird mystique around it — something that only Julia [Child] and Jim [Beard] can get to,” she wrote. “Food is food. Everybody eats!”
For Grosvenor, cooking was a way to connect to her Geechee-African heritage. That in itself was revolutionary, even more so than referring to her method of cooking as “vibration cooking.” While she was writing the book, her kitchen in New York’s East Village was a gathering place for members of the Black Arts and Black Power movements in the city. She was a volunteer cook for the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program. She was also an expert at stretching one chicken into a meal for eight or 10, and the book is filled with the names of people who sat down at her table — often first names only, because everyone she ate with who had good vibrations was a friend. “I don’t ever have no money to lend,” she wrote, “but I can’t refuse to give food away.” If a guest had bad vibrations, she explained, she would give them money to eat at the Automat rather than suffer vibration-related indigestion.
Black Americans have always used some form of vibration cooking, Grosvenor wrote; they’ve always adapted. That skill, along with the rice, is also part of the heritage she was reclaiming. What people in the ’60s started calling soul food was never about enslaved people gathering up their masters’ leftovers, she told the Washington Post in 1986: “First off, historically, slaves would be beaten for eating the same food as their masters.” True soul food was about making do with tough, bony, or otherwise unpromising ingredients — ham hocks, chitterlings, bitter greens — the way poor people everywhere have always done. The thing that distinguished Black soul food was the addition of ingredients that had also been brought over from Africa as part of the slave trade: hot pepper, greens, watermelon, benne seeds, and okra (which Grosvenor insisted on calling by its African name “gombo” because she was tired of being defined by white people and “okra must be sick of that mess, too”).
In Vibration Cooking, Grosvenor describes being taken to a fancy restaurant in Paris by a group of people eager to show off their expertise with French food. “So these people order for me and they are just on pins and needles, dying, really dying for me to taste this enjoyable rare dish. Well thank you Jesus the food arrives and it ain’t nothing but CHITTERLINGS in the form of a sausage. They call it andouillette.”
If French people eat chitterlings, why should she be confined to a certain kind of food just because she was Black? And what made French food so different from Black food that it could only be prepared according to Julia Child? “Salade Niçoise is a French name,” she wrote in Vibration Cooking, “but just like with anything else when soul folks get it they take it out into another thing.” Grosvenor’s salad Niçoise contained, in addition to the classic tuna, tomatoes, and green beans, two cups of cold cooked rice.
That spirit of liberation defines Vibration Cooking, right down the way that it’s written. Grosvenor came from a culture of storytellers, and to honor that, she used a loose, conversational style. She was larger than life and refused to let anyone make her small.
Grosvenor wrote the book when she was in a low period. She’d dreamed of a career on the stage, but there weren’t many opportunities for six-foot-tall Black actresses. She’d been cast in a Broadway play, Mandingo, in 1961 (her castmates included Dennis Hopper and Franchot Tone), but it closed after eight performances. She also performed with — and cooked for — Sun-Ra’s Arkestra, but by the late ’60s, Grosvenor was in need of a way to express herself. So she borrowed her neighbor’s typewriter, sat down at her kitchen table, and began writing down her life story, along with the recipes. She didn’t bother with capital letters.
Grosvenor’s then-9-year-old daughter, Kali, was something of a poetry prodigy, and an acquaintance who worked at Doubleday came to their apartment one day to meet her. Embarrassed by the attention, Kali told her visitor that her mother was also a writer. The manuscripts of Poems by Kali and Vibration Cooking were both duly delivered to Doubleday, where the cookbook ended up in the hands of a young Black editorial assistant named Marie Dutton Brown who had been hired both to diversify the staff and to find books that would appeal to Black readers.
Vibration Cooking was the first book that Brown ever edited. She persuaded Grosvenor to use conventional capitalization, but otherwise maintained the loosely autobiographical structure. It began with the portentous story of Grosvenor’s birth: she weighed three pounds and had a twin brother who died. She nearly died as well, but her family saved her by constructing a makeshift incubator out of a shoebox that sat on the oven door. The story continued through her childhood in South Carolina amid a large and colorful family; her adolescence in Philadelphia where her family moved after a mule stomped her on the head and the nearest hospital refused to treat her because it didn’t take “colored” patients; and her life in Paris, where she’d moved when she was 19 to become a bohemian. (“I thought I was a freak,” she explained, “and the bohemian life was the only one for me because they were tolerant of everyone.”)
There are numerous digressions on things Grosvenor loves, things that make her mad, and various jobs, dinner parties, pranks, battles, and adventures. And there are recipes, casually interspersed among the stories. Some of them have weights and measures and times, like conventional recipes. These are the recipes Grosvenor collected from other people and put down as they were given to her. But, for the most part, she and her family didn’t cook like that. “When we tasted something we liked, we’d ask, ‘How do you fix yours?’” she told the Washington Post. “They’d say, ‘I put in nutmeg and a little bit of allspice.’ No one told you how much; there was something almost mystical about it.”
This, for example, is Uptight Ragout in its entirety: “Take leftover meat and a couple of chicken legs and add fresh vegetables and rice and cook together until done.”
Brown preserved the recipes, too. She told the writer Mayukh Sen that in 2016, after Grosvenor died, she picked up Vibration Cooking for the first time in many years. “I was like, Oh my God! We published this book? They quote-unquote let us?” Brown said, laughing. “A lot of it is still bold and truthful, and it represents another level of blackness that is not so exposed in the narrative since.” Some scholars have described it as a cross between The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and the work of Zora Neale Hurston, another anthropologist who wanted the world to take Black culture seriously and who refused to compromise her own voice for the sake of academia.
Grosvenor, of course, grew up cooking. “Poor Mother never complained about all the food I messed up,” she wrote. After that much trial and error, cooking became instinctual. I do not have that relationship with food. I don’t trust my own vibrations. Growing up, I learned to bake, not cook. (This is what happens when you’re raised by someone who hates to cook but loves chocolate chip cookies.) I am used to precise measurements. And food is expensive. I don’t like messing up. The prospect of vibration cooking made me nervous. Grosvenor would have said I’m uptight, and she would have been right.
Although, I realized, there were a few things I cook by my own vibrations — or rather, I have made them so many times, I’ve worked out my own way, slightly different from the original recipes. Pizza sauce, for instance. And scrambled eggs. And I never follow written instructions about the amounts of salt, pepper, or, especially, garlic.
So one night, I decided to make Ground Nut Stew, a dish I had never seen nor eaten. I also made rice. Grosvenor’s rice recipe is, at least, extremely precise, maybe because rice is so important. You use one part rice to two parts cold water and you rub the rice between your hands to wash it. Then you bring it to a boil, simmer for 13 minutes, and then let the pot rest with the lid on for another 12. It works perfectly, and I am now a convert and evangelist. (Well, I have told one person. So far.)
The Ground Nut Stew recipe, however, is only slightly more descriptive than Uptight Ragout:
“Cut up and season and sauté the chicken in peanut oil. When brown, add chopped bell pepper and chopped onions. When the onions are transparent, add red pepper and chicken broth and lots chunky-style peanut butter. Sauce should be on the stiff side.”
That left a lot of room for vibration. In the case of the chicken, I realized, after it was already in the pan, that Grosvenor had probably meant boneless chicken breasts or thighs cut up into small pieces, not individual parts. So I pulled it out and cut the meat from the bones. There was a lot of waste; I quailed under the disapproving ancestral eye of my great-grandfather, the poultry dealer. But otherwise, it went smoothly. My own vibrations told me to add one bell pepper and one onion; in the future, I know to add at least two peppers and maybe some chopped fresh chiles instead of red pepper flakes. I also added a handful of raw peanuts for texture because I didn’t feel like the peanut butter I used was chunky enough. I was getting the hang of it! Maybe another term for vibration cooking should be confidence. Or pride.
In the end, I had a Ground Nut Stew, and it was delicious. I’ve never had a Ground Nut Stew to compare it to, and maybe that’s for the best. This one is mine. There’s so much about cookbook and cooking culture to make a person nervous, so many books and magazines and websites and TikToks about the “right” way to do things that you automatically assume you must be doing it wrong. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor never felt she got the attention she was due, but her whole life — and Vibration Cooking in particular — was an argument that being unafraid to be yourself in the kitchen, in your community, and in the wider world, is one of the most liberating and revolutionary things a person can do.
Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.
