Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (North American Religions)

As a scholar of African Diaspora secular and sacred foodways I have been anxiously awaiting this book since I first heard about it a few years ago. As Perez states there is a paucity of material written about the food of the gods common to West African religious traditions. Much has been written about dance, dress, music and trance, ore co-presence associated with these traditions. Yet, before ceremonies can be initiated the deities must be fed. Many years ago Jack Goody wrote Cooking, Cuisine and Class in which he theorized criteria whereby a region or nation may have a foodways tradition that could be considered a cuisine. Goody’s work was predicated upon hierarchies of power, often couched in the presence of elites or royalty. The explicit and implicit nature of “haute” preparations for the elites became the hallmark of presence of cuisine. African foodways were not included in this roster. Yet with the arrival of Religion in the Kitchen we can revisit Goody’s work, and link the genesis of a cuisine equally to spiritual practices as easily as he did to wealth and status.I am as fascinated as Perez is with the idea of taste, as an evolved sense here deployed to entreat the gods. Historically early Greco-Roman philosophers stressed the value of the higher senses, memory, vision, intellect and hearing. They ascribed smell, touch and taste to the “lower bodily stratum” as coined by Rabelais. While it is true what we ingest becomes feces, a potential fertilizer, and thus base, it is also a re-affirmation of the cycle of life, the intercession with the deities who constitute the natural world, which sustains us. The subtle and profound intervention that Perez has created by identifying her respondents “micropractices” is beautiful. These practices based in the artisanal skill of cooking, ritual slaughter, ritual practice associated with the presentation of offertory meals, or in the plasticity of the coded double and triple entendre occupy the same ground in relation to standard english that vernacular speech such as kryol, patois, or “ebonics” does to communicate to the cognoscenti in implicit and explicit ways the essence of the moment; whether personal, political or both. I cannot recommend this foundational text more highly. If you have an interest in religious culture, linguistics, food and foodways, the Black Atlantic, or all of the above, grab this book now.

Good content, well searched but needs to be less verbose. Good story telling is what makes good content great. The very heart of traditions like the Lukumi are kept thanks to storytelling that is down to earth and relates to the reader.

it was not what I thought it would have in it I wasn't too impressed that is why I gave it to Stars

As an Olorisha in Lukumi, I can't recommend this book highly enough! While most scholarship focuses on the 'macropractices' of major rituals and rites of passages, such as kariocha, Pérez instead turns her focus onto the 'micropractices' of cooking and speech that are often overlooked. As my elders have said to me, and I now say to my Godchildren, "around the dinner table is where the real religion happens." So frequently outsiders and people new to the religion focus on the glamorous (arduous) work of rituals, not paying any attention to the fact that 'micropractices' are where the religion itself happens and, importantly, are where and how we are instructed. Few scholars have paid much attention to the litany of 'dinner rules' that attend eating among Santeros, let alone all of the work and thought that goes into the preparation of the food itself. It's a relief to see someone who gets it, finally.In addition to the theoretical work on the importance of micropractices, the book serves as a loving ethnographic tribute to the ilé (community) in Chicago in which the author conducted her fieldwork. The attention to a small number of well-drawn informants recalled, for me, Karen McCarthy Brown's magnum opus Mama Lola. Here, as in Mama Lola, the stories of the practitioners themselves are as important, or perhaps more important, than detailing the cosmology or ritual structures more frequently laid out in the literature on Afro-Diasporic religions. What Pérez illuminates is how the process of practitioners telling their stories is itself a religious act that creates a sense of cohesion for the religious community.Religion in the Kitchen is a pleasure to read.

While I am more versed in the life-world of Brazilian Candomblé religious practices I immediately was drawn into the interiority of Elizabeth Perez’s important text on food and language within a Lucumí temple. Perez adroitly maps those interstitial spaces often historically relegated to women and their labor. The cooking and the snippets of conversations, defined as “micropractices “are reminiscent of Meredith Abarca’s Charlas Culinarias, those free flowing conversations that provide meaning to women while they work together shared often in kitchens while preparing festival foods such as tamales. This book provides a rare view into the liminal space of the Lucumí cloister and the coded dialogues therein. Paraphrasing Perez’s deployment of David Chappelle, “Every Black American is bilingual,” we learn that here in the temple the gendered, and or personal is political.

I am personally most familiar with the culture and auspicious tones associated with cowrie shell divination and Egungun ancestral worship practices. Based upon these experiences Elizabeth Perez’s, Religion in the Kitchen is a stupendous achievement. It has given me insight to the inner workings of the experiences and ceremonies I have been privileged to participate in. This book is more than a worthwhile read. It should be a touchstone in the field of Afro-centric Diaspora religious culture and history. Karen Ostrom, Multi-disciplinary Artist

This is an amazing book! It’s beautifully written and subtly argued, with an incredible attention to how small gestures and practices help create religious identity. Yet the book also engages really big questions—about religion, history, and politics—and answers them with aplomb. The book is simultaneously a page-turner and a kind of academic barnburner. It's a model for how to make a book both rigorous and thrilling.