Hallelujah! Welcome to Maya Angelou’s table

NEW YORK (AP) — All her life, it seems as she looks back, writer and poet Maya Angelou has had an enviably acute awareness of food and cooking as a dimension of experience.

Her new book, “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table” (Random House, 2004, $29.95), makes clear the links she remembers between certain tastes, dishes and meals, and the intense emotions of the unforgettable occasions that were their context.

The book, subtitled “A Lifetime of Memories With Recipes,” is much more than a cookbook — but it’s that too, the recipes paired with the perceptive vignettes, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, that themselves are a feast.

“I’ve long known that food features in our lives so much more dominantly than we realize,” Angelou said in a recent interview, on a visit to the city. “Food can be used to pacify, to enrage, to court, to uplift…”

She quoted with amusement an old blues lyric commenting on a woman’s cooking that “she cooks cornbread for her husband but she cooks biscuits for her man” — Angelou drawled out the word “man.”

Later that day at a book signing, she reminded her laughing bookstore audience that food can be used to woo — “When a person says `I want to take you to dinner,’ it’s not always about dinner.”

Angelou, 76, lives in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her book takes readers back to her early childhood in Stamps, Ark., already learning how love and comfort can be inseparable from the food that nurturing people cook.

Later, she learned to cook that way for others, in the course of a life that’s taken her far from her birthplace, as a performer, educator, civil-rights activist, producer and director, as well as a much-honored writer. And, yes, when she needed the job, working as a cook.

Angelou didn’t keep notes along the way, she said, because “I have a really rather queer memory,” which she relates to several years in her childhood when she did not speak.

“I am able to remember things entirely,” she said. “I used to memorize whole books, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Langston Hughes.”

Chapters in “Hallelujah! The Welcome Table” touch on various periods of her life, starting with those early years when she already savored the good food at the family table, then beyond to places that included San Francisco, Paris and London.

“I think I knew it all along as I was meeting it,” she said, asked about the early development of that lifelong taste. “Momma (her maternal grandmother) cooked so easily, it seemed. She cooked on a wood stove and her dishes came out so light and good. Then, at 13, with my mother — she was as good a cook, but a different cook.” Her brother, two years her senior, was such a good cook he became a chef, she said.

For all its narrative flow, the book didn’t always come easily, Angelou said. “I wrote about 35 or 40 pages — and then the book suddenly stopped, sat down like a mule and wouldn’t be goaded or enticed forward.”

About a year later, she was visiting the photographer Brian Lanker whose work illustrates the book, and when he heard about the block, Angelou recalled, “he said,`You need photographs!”’

Angelou was hesitant to ask him to come and do them, “but he said he’d do it in a heartbeat, and the photos led me back into the story,” she said.

She cooked all the dishes for the photographs in eight or nine days, two or three dishes a day, when the photographer and his assistant came down to her home in North Carolina. “He had to photograph them in about 20 minutes, because we were to eat the food for dinner and we could not let the dishes spoil,” she said.

Her first choice of a recipe for readers to try is the cold potato salad, linked in the book to a sharply told, uncomfortable episode of greed, with an ending warmed by Momma’s wisdom.

Another extraordinary moment is paired with the recipe for red rice, a dish that evokes an occasion after a memorable meal when her mother spoke words of unexpected encouragement, on a street in San Francisco. “I remember the smell of the vinegar from the pickle factory on the corner; I remember the lights in the street car.”

In writing the book, she said, she has enjoyed remembering all these things. It’s been an attempt to deal with some of the ways food has been a central element “in my desire to understand who I am and where I am.”

Will there be another cookbook-memoir?

“I thought I had finished,” she replied, “but then I realized I have that many stories again” — so it seems there might be.

This is the potato salad that Angelou remembers being “the star of the show” at a Sunday dinner, mounded high in its serving bowl.

Cold Potato Salad

6 cups peeled, diced, cooked potatoes

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 cup finely diced celery

1 cup chopped dill pickles

1 cup sweet relish, drained

8 large hard-boiled eggs, 4 chopped, 4 whole

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 1/2 cups mayonnaise

Fresh parsley, chopped

Combine potatoes, onion, celery, pickles, relish and chopped eggs. Season with salt and pepper, and add mayonnaise. Chill for several hours. Just before serving, halve the remaining 4 eggs, and place on salad as decoration. Dust with parsley and serve at once.

Makes 6 to 8 servings.

“One important date that stands out in my mind I call Vivian’s Red Rice Day,” Angelou writes, recalling a day in San Francisco, when she was 20. She visited her mother, Vivian Baxter, who cooked a meal for her that included roasted capon, a simple lettuce salad, and red rice — which Angelou calls “my favorite food in all the world.”

The chicken and the salad “do not feature so prominently on my taste buds’ memory, but each grain of red rice is emblazoned on the surface of my tongue forever.”

After the meal, as they walked away together, her mother stopped and said. “Baby. I’ve been thinking and now I’m sure. You are the greatest woman I’ve ever met.”

Suppose she was right, Angelou thought. “Imagine, I might really become somebody.”

Red Rice

1/2 pound thick sliced bacon

1 cup chopped onions

1/2 cup chopped red bell peppers

2 cups canned tomatoes

6-ounce can tomato paste

Dash of freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 cups cooked white rice

2 cups water

Fry bacon in a large skillet on medium heat until brown, stirring with fork. Add onions and peppers. Cover and cook for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove lid and add remaining ingredients: mix well. Bring to boil, about 3 minutes. Stir vigorously; cover again, and cook over very low heat for about 15 minutes until rice and liquid are totally mixed.

Makes 8 servings.

Roasted Capon

One 2- to 3-pound capon

Juice of 1 lemon

1 cup water

4 tablespoons ( 1/2 stick) butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 unpeeled Granny Smith apple, cored and cut into pieces

1 stalk celery, cut into pieces

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Wash capon in lemon juice mixed with water. Pat dry, and rub butter over capon. Liberally salt and pepper capon outside and inside. Place apple and celery in capon cavity.

Make aluminum foil tent, and place over capon. Bake for 1 hour, periodically basting with juices in pan. Remove foil. Reduce oven to 325 F, and bake for 30 more minutes.

Makes 4 servings.