martes, 25 de enero de 2011

What Africa Brought to the Table

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

What Africa Brought to the Table

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: January 24, 2011

“You hear a lot of jazz about soul food,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in “Soul on Ice,” his 1968 prison memoir. Cleaver didn’t want that stuff on his plate every night. “The people in the ghetto want steaks. Beef steaks. I wish I had the power to see to it that the bourgeoisie really did have to make it on soul food.”

Kristy May

Jessica B. Harris

HIGH ON THE HOG

A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

By Jessica B. Harris

Illustrated. 291 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.

Excerpt: ‘High on the Hog’(January 24, 2011)

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From the book, "High on the Hog" by Jessica B. Harris (Bloomsbury)

A traditional market in Dakar, Senegal.

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Frances Benjamin Johnston/Library of Congress

A cooking class at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Va., around 1899.

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From "High on the Hog" by Jessica B. Harris (Bloomsbury)

A dinner at the home of the author of “High on the Hog,” Jessica B. Harris, in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard.

Cleaver’s lines came back to me recently while I was sitting in Red Rooster, the new Harlem neo-soul restaurant owned by the Ethiopian-born celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. The menu at Red Rooster — after the collard greens, the shrimp and grits, and the “fried yard bird” — ends with this showstopper: a $32 “uptown steak frites” with truffle béarnaise. Cleaver, who died in 1998, would have enjoyed this.

I thought about Cleaver’s lines, too, while reading Jessica B. Harris’s absorbing new book, “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” Ms. Harris zeroes in on what she sees as the two divergent strands of African-American cooking. The first reveres homey staples like corn pone, fried chicken and chitterlings (a pig’s small intestines), and embraces those cooks who can, as she writes, “put a hurtin’ on a mess of greens.”

The second strand is aspirational and omnivorous. Historically, it includes recipes from, she says, “Big House cooks who prepared lavish banquets, caterers who created a culinary cooperative in Philadelphia in the 19th century, a legion of black hoteliers and culinary moguls and a growing black middle and upper class.”

Ms. Harris belongs, firmly, to that black upper class. She’s a respected cookbook writer — her many books include “The Africa Cookbook” (1998) — who divides her time, according to the book’s dust jacket, among New York City, Martha’s Vineyard and New Orleans.

In “High on the Hog” she branches out into narrative nonfiction, with mostly toothsome results. Her plain, gently simmering prose will not make you forget Michael Pollan’s.But Ms. Harris has an eye for detail and an inquisitive manner on the page, qualities that take any writer a long way.

“High on the Hog” covers a lot of territory in terms of African-American eating habits. (Ms. Harris refers to those eating habits, widely construed, as “foodways,” and I wish she wouldn’t. It’s a vaguely sanctimonious term that’s caught on among food historians, especially Southern ones,in recent years. I await the books on sexways and toiletways.)

Ms. Harris examines West African staple foods in the centuries before slavery; she details the grim slop captives were fed during the terrors of the Middle Passage. She explores the life of George Washington’s revered black cook at Mount Vernon, Hercules, and Thomas Jefferson’s talented cook, James Hemings, the brother of Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings, who some historians believe was Jefferson’s mistress. She dilates on black cowboys and Pullman porters and the authors of the earliest black cookbooks. Her true topic is, as she puts it, “the Africanizing of the Southern palate,” and ultimately of the American one.

I especially enjoyed the chapters that cover the second half of the 20th century and beyond. She quotes Ralph Ellison, in “Invisible Man,” describing a food cart “from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.” Ms. Harris loves this sentence. Yet she gently reproves Ellison, letting us know that he was almost certainly describing not yams, but sweet potatoes.

She lists the restaurants where important players in the civil rights movement liked to eat big. She detours into the dietary strictures of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who urged his followers to get off the “slave diet.”

Muhammad wrote: “Just stop eating the swine flesh, and your life will be expanded. Stay off that grandmother’s old-fashioned corn bread and black-eyed peas, and those quick 15-minute biscuits made with baking powder.” So what did Muhammad eat? A lot of bean pies, Ms. Harris writes.

She is outraged at the “culinary apartheid” she found in some urban neighborhoods in America. “We were getting stuck with overprocessed foods, low-quality meats and second- or third-rate produce,” she writes. “It is a lesson I will not forget.”

She casts an appraising eye at the recent crop of black culinary trailblazers. She mourns the early death, in 1998 at 42, of Patrick Clark, a black chef who made his name at Manhattan restaurants like Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg and Tavern on the Green. She explores the careers of Edna Lewis, Sylvia Woods — the owner of Sylvia’s, the popular Harlem restaurant — and the New Orleans Creole cook Leah Chase.

Ms. Harris flips on the TV and discusses, excellently, Pat and Gina Neely, the lively hosts of the Food Network show “Down Home with the Neelys.” This couple, she writes, “have become arguably the best-known African-American cooks in the country,” and thus worthy taking seriously.

Ms. Harris seems to approve of the Neelys, sort of, though there were bumps along the way. “At the show’s inception, most viewers were outraged by everything from the dishes prepared on the air to the dialogue,” she writes. “A strawberry cake prepared with cake mix, Jell-O, strawberries and whipped cream came under particular fire, as did the family’s ‘loud and boisterous’ manner.”

She goes on about the Neelys: “The level of sexual innuendo in the couple’s banter and the personal style of Gina Neely were other points of dismay. African-American viewers were particularly concerned that the show not be a throwback to behavior considered stereotypical and not a representation of the diversity and sophistication of African-American lifestyle and cooking.” She concludes, “Changes were made.”

Black cuisine is still too often viewed as “unhealthy, inelegant and hopelessly out of sync with the culinary canons that define healthy eating today,” Ms. Harris writes. She notes that most black families restrict those artery-clogging meals to Sundays, holidays and family reunions. And she declares, wistfully and yet with optimism, “The cooking of Africa has yet to have its moment on the foodie radar.”

A version of this review appeared in print on January 25, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

The Sweeping Gestures of a Swiveling Maestro

MUSIC REVIEW

The Sweeping Gestures of a Swiveling Maestro

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: January 24, 2011

REPRINTS

James Levine devoted the Met Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon to two works, but they were big, demanding ones.Mozart’s “Posthorn” Serenade (K. 320), despite a title that suggests a light entertainment, is as grand as most of his symphonies and, at 45 minutes, twice as long as most of them. And “Das Lied von der Erde,” Mahler’s monumental setting of ancient Chinese poetry, is a symphony disguised as a song cycle.

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The Met Orchestra, led by James Levine, performed Mozart and Mahler at Carnegie Hall on Sunday.

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Mr. Levine led the orchestra from his customary swivel chair.

Mr. Levine led these works with the energy and sweeping conducting gestures that he has brought to his work all season, and though he continues to walk with a cane, as he did at the opening of “Simon Boccanegra” at the Met on Thursday, he did not seem in the least frail, as he reportedly did then. He took the stage at a good clip, the cane apparently providing a measure of security. When he reached the podium, he handed the cane to the concertmaster and climbed onto his customary swivel chair.

And he swiveled: to the right and to the left and even, at one point in the Mozart, nearly all the way around to the audience.

Mr. Levine has long been an eloquent Mozartean. And if his interpretive approach has been largely unaffected by the findings and fashions of the period-instrument movement, he has always found ways to keep his performances trim and tightly focused while reveling in both the heft and the sonic sheen that a modern orchestra can provide.

Mostly, his account of the “Posthorn” achieved those qualities, thanks in great measure to the orchestra’s beautifully tuned brass chords, elegant flute and oboe playing, and a string sound that blended an often velvety tone with precise, unified ornamentation. Even when the reading veered toward heaviness, in both minuets, Mr. Levine usually applied an unexpected balance or a thoughtful phrasing touch that effectively disarmed any objections.

The orchestra’s playing was even more sumptuous in the Mahler, not surprisingly, and Mr. Levine’s reading was more highly personalized, for better and for worse. His penchant for lingering tempos and dramatic pauses made a certain sense in the finale, “Der Abschied,” which is, after all, a mystical account of a final, pained leave-taking, tinged with the disappointments of a troubled life. Yet at times Mr. Levine seemed to take these effects slightly too far. The sense of tension and expectation that his tempos occasioned can easily give way to impatience, and that began to happen toward the end of the performance.

The soloists were also a mixed success: Simon O’Neill’s tenor sounded thin against Mahler’s lush orchestral backdrop, and at times he had trouble making himself heard. Michelle DeYoung, the mezzo-soprano, was more powerful and more consistently pleasing, and in “Der Abschied,” her nuanced reading touched the core of the music.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 25, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.

More to a Smile Than Lips and Teeth

By CARL ZIMMER

Published: January 24, 2011

REPRINTS

In the middle of a phone call four years ago, Paula Niedenthal began to wonder what it really means to smile. The call came from a Russian reporter, who was interviewing Dr. Niedenthal about her research on facial expressions.

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LINKS When the zygomaticus major muscles in our cheeks contract, they draw up the corners of our mouths. But there’s much more to a smile than that. A chimpanzee will sometimes grin and show its teeth to assert power.

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“At the end he said, ‘So you are American?’ ” Dr. Niedenthal recalled.

Indeed, she is, although she was then living in France, where she had taken a post at Blaise Pascal University.

“So you know,” the Russian reporter informed her, “that American smiles are all false, and French smiles are all true.”

“Wow, it’s so interesting that you say that,” Dr. Niedenthal said diplomatically. Meanwhile, she was imagining what it would have been like to spend most of her life surrounded by fake smiles.

“I suddenly became interested in how people make these kinds of errors,” Dr. Niedenthal said. But finding the source of the error would require knowing what smiles really are — where they come from and how people process them. And despite the fact that smiling is one of the most common things that we humans do, Dr. Niedenthal found science’s explanation for it to be weak.

“I think it’s pretty messed up,” she said. “I think we don’t know very much, actually, and it’s something I want to take on.”

To that end, Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues have surveyed a wide range of studies, from brain scans to cultural observations, to build a new scientific model of the smile. They believe they can account not only for the source of smiles, but how people perceive them. In a recent issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, theyargue that smiles are not simply the expression of an internal feeling. Smiles in fact are only the most visible part of an intimate melding between two minds.

“It’s an impressive, sophisticated analysis,” said Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University.

Psychologists have studied smiles carefully for decades, but mostly from the outside. When the zygomaticus major muscles in our cheeks contract, they draw up the corners of our mouths. But there’s much more to a smile than that.

“A smile is not this floating thing, like a Cheshire Cat,” said Dr. Niedenthal. “It’s attached to a body.” Sometimes the lips open to reveal teeth; sometimes they stay sealed. Sometimes the eyes crinkle. The chin rises with some smiles, and drops in others.

Cataloging these variations is an important first step, said Dr. Niedenthal, but it can’t deliver an answer to the enigma of smiles. “People like to make dictionaries of the facial muscles to make a particular gesture, but there’s no depth to that approach,” she said.

Some researchers have tried to move deeper, to understand the states of mind that produce smiles. We think of them as signifying happiness, and indeed, researchers do find that the more intensely people contract their zygomaticus major muscles, the happier they say they feel. But this is far from an iron law. The same muscles sometimes contract when people are feeling sadness or disgust, for example.

The link between feelings and faces is even more mysterious. Why should any feeling cause us to curl up our mouths, after all? This is a question that Darwin pondered for years. An important clue, he said, is found in the faces of apes, which draw up their mouths as well. These expressions, Darwin argued, were also smiles. In other words, Mona Lisa inherited her endlessly intriguing smile from the grinning common ancestor she shared with chimpanzees.

Primatologists have been able to sort smiles into a few categories, and Dr. Niedenthal thinks that human smiles should be classified in the same way. Chimpanzees sometimes smile from pleasure, as when baby chimps play with each other. but chimpanzees also smile when they’re trying to strengthen a social bond with another chimpanzee.

Dr. Niedenthal thinks that some human smiles fall into these categories as well. What’s more, they may be distinguished by certain expressions. An embarrassed smile is often accompanied by a lowered chin, for example, while a smile of greeting often comes with raised eyebrows.

Chimpanzees sometimes smile not for pleasure or for a social bond, but for power. A dominant chimpanzee will grin and show its teeth. Dr. Niedenthal argues that humans flash a power grin as well — often raising their chin so as to look down at others.

“ ‘You’re an idiot, I’m better than you’—that’s what we mean by a dominant smile,” said Dr. Niedenthal.

But making a particular facial expression is just the first step of a smile. Dr. Niedenthal argues that how another person interprets the smile is equally important. In her model, the brain can use three different means to distinguish a smile from some other expression.

One way people recognize smiles is comparing the geometry of a person’s face to a standard smile. A second way is thinking about the situation in which someone is making an expression, judging if it’s the sort where a smile would be expected.

But most importantly, Dr. Niedenthal argues, people recognize smiles by mimicking them. When a smiling person locks eyes with another person, the viewer unknowingly mimics a smile as well. In their new paper, Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues point to a number of studies indicating that this imitation activates many of the same regions of the brain that are active in the smiler.

A happy smile, for example, is accompanied by activity in the brain’s reward circuits, and looking at a happy smile can excite those circuits as well. Mimicking a friendly smile produces a different pattern of brain activity. It activates a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which distinguishes feelings for people with whom we have a close relationship from others. The orbitofrontal cortex becomes active when parents see their own babies smile, for example, but not other babies.

If Dr. Niedenthal’s model is correct, then studies of dominant smiles should reveal different patterns of brain activity. Certain regions associated with negative emotions should become active.

Embodying smiles not only lets people recognize smiles, Dr. Niedenthal argues. It also lets them recognize false smiles. When they unconsciously mimic a false smile, they don’t experience the same brain activity as an authentic one. The mismatch lets them know something’s wrong.

Other experts on facial expressions applaud Dr. Niedenthal’s new model, but a number of them also think that parts of it require fine-tuning. “Her model fits really well along the horizontal dimension, but I have my doubts about the vertical,” said Dr. Galinsky. He questions whether people observing a dominant smile would experience the feeling of power themselves. In fact, he points out, in such encounters, people tend to avoid eye contact, which Dr. Niedenthal says is central to her model.

Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.

Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.

In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.

But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren’t. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.

Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues have also been testing the importance of eye contact for smiles. They had students look at a series of portraits, like the “Laughing Cavalier” by the 17th-century artist Frans Hals. In some portraits the subject looked away from the viewer, while in others, the gaze was eye to eye. In some trials, the students looked at the paintings with bars masking the eyes.

The participants rated how emotional the impact of the painting was. Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues found, as they had predicted, that people felt a bigger emotional impact when the eyes were unmasked than when they were masked. The smile was identical in each painting, but it was not enough on its own. What’s more, the differences were greater when the portrait face was making direct eye contact with the viewer.

Dr. Niedenthal suspects that she and other psychologists are just starting to learn secrets about smiles that artists figured out centuries ago. It may even be possible someday to understand why Mona Lisa’s smile is so powerful. “I would say the reason it was so successful is because you achieve eye contact with her,” said Dr. Niedenthal, “and so the fact that the meaning of her smile is complicated is doubly communicated, because your own simulation of it is mysterious and difficult.”