Bon Appétit magazine keeps shooting itself in the foot. The venerable magazine's downward spiral began in June when editor Adam Rapoport resigned after images surfaced of him wearing blackface at a party. This was soon followed by accusations of inequitable treatment of BIPOC staff members by BA's parent company. Several members of the BA Test Kitchen resigned in protest. The magazine began to right its ship in late August when it named Dawn Davis to be its new editor in chief, but the good press didn't last long.
The latest controversy comes after BA published a so-called soup joumou recipe earlier this week, written by Chef Marcus Samuelsson. Critics claimed the recipe was an example of cultural appropriation. Soup joumou is a historically and culturally important Haitian dish, however, BA's discussion of the soup's history was almost an afterthought. (Somewhat ironically, the only other recipes for the soup in the EYB Library, like the version from Christopher Kimball's Milk Street pictured above, are also from white authors.) To add insult to injury, the soup did not resemble traditional interpretations of the dish, trading the customary beef, plantain, and potatoes for coconut milk, cinnamon sticks, and candied nuts.
What's more, one of the initial three authors credited in the recipe, Yewande Komolafe, said via Instagram that she was not involved in the recipe development. “I didn’t write this recipe,” she wrote on her Instagram Story. “And I definitely didn’t write those headnotes. I did not submit this to @bonappetitmag or @marcuscooks and will request that they take my name off of this.” Komolafe did work on other recipes in Chef Samuelsson's recent book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.
BA has removed all authors except Samuelsson and tweeted an apology: "We’ve updated the name and headnote of this recipe to accurately reflect that this pumpkin soup from chef Marcus Samuelsson is inspired by the historic Haitian soup joumou, excerpted from his cookbook The Rise. We apologize for misrepresenting this recipe."
7 comments
Vanessa
CHRat
Vanessa
I don't have the cookbook and haven't read the headnote in that book.
ICUStat
ekontrovitz
LD57
Mapi
Now it seems you can't take inspiration from another culture's recipes, changing and adapting them to your tastes and the ingredients available to you, without being accused of cultural appropriation. I call this an involution, and a dangerous one. Ideology should be kept out of the kitchen.