Take your pick of the grill’s jerk chicken leg quarters, each marinated and charred to perfection. Or crunch your way through a crispy black-eyed pea fritter, so rich you would never guess it was made with only plant-based ingredients. Or have a chef prepare some “comfort food,” whipped up according to your taste buds.
This is how three Boston chefs would put their personal twists on Juneteenth, the Texas-based holiday that — made a federal and state holiday in 2021 — recognizes the end of slavery in the United States.
As the Black Southern tradition surges in popularity, more members of Boston’s African diaspora are infusing their culinary perspectives into Juneteenth cuisine. They’re realizing how each community’s signature foods are more alike than they are different.
“There is no holiday that’s only for African Americans, or only for Africans, or only for Caribbeans, because at the end of the day, we all are connected,” said Asim Shakur-DuVall, cafe and catering manager of Nubian Markets, a Roxbury grocery store focused on cuisine of the Black diaspora. “It’s better to share our culture amongst each other, and expose each other to different experiences.”
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day that enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom. The order provided by Union Major General Gordon Granger abolished slavery in the country, excluding tribal reservations.
The celebration has evolved from solemn remembrances into light-hearted jubilees, from small church gatherings to thousands-large parades. On Saturday, Bostonians gathered in Hyde Park for the fourth-annual Juneteenth Joy celebration, and Embrace Boston on Tuesday kicked off its four-day Embrace Ideas festival with an awards ceremony, panels, and a block party at multiple city locations.
But for most of the holiday’s short history, what has remained relatively static is the food that people eat: barbecue, watermelon, and red drinks, rouge-hued items that represent the bloodshed of enslaved Americans, said Adrian Miller, a Denver-based soul food scholar and author of “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.”
In recent years, though, food enthusiasts said the “racial reckoning” of 2020, and both federal and state recognitions of the holiday, have brought Juneteenth into the mainstream, and pushed new generations of people to incorporate the day into their list of annual jamborees — and bring their own foods to the dinner table.
“Black people in Boston: they’re Puerto Rican, they’re Haitian, they’re Jamaican. This is an immigration place,” added Jumaada Abdal-Khallaq Henry Smith, co-chair of the Boston Juneteenth Committee, which is coordinating a flag-raising and parade in honor of the holiday on Wednesday in Roxbury.
Shakur-DuVall’s earliest memories include his mother’s rich macaroni and cheese. He remembers joking with family as they snapped collard green leaves from their strong stalks and placed them in cold water in preparation for the forthcoming potluck.
“Food has always been attached to family and fun,” Shakur-DuVall said. “Picking collard greens off the stem is something so simple, but it just goes to show how food can really bring people together.”
Shakur-DuVall’s family encouraged culinary exploration, so his dinner table was covered with dishes from different corners of the globe.
“Being around all the different cultures, being around all the different types of cuisines — you might as well try something new,” he said.
Shakur-DuVall carries his philosophy into his vision of Juneteenth, a holiday he admits he didn’t know much about until researching in the stillness of the pandemic. If picked as chef for a Juneteenth feast, he would cook “comfort food,” which might mean his mother’s creamy mac. Or, for one of Nubian Markets’ many customers, hearty lamb stew with a side of injera flatbread.
“That just shows the beauty of the African diaspora and the culture that it has,” Shakur-DuVall said.
For Gaitskell “Chef Gates” Cleghorn Jr., his palette was shaped by two pieces of the diaspora. He would watch his African American mother’s kneading and rolling of her famous cinnamon roll dough and snag a piece to mold with his tiny hands when she wasn’t looking. Or he’d savor the few days that his Jamaican father would cook homemade beef patties, because the difficult dough preparation process made it an occasional treat.
But there were influences from outside the diaspora, too; when his military family was stationed in Germany, he could “smell the fresh baked bread from down the street.”
Such an upbringing planted the seeds for Cleghorn’s current role as a culinary instructor at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and founder of Delectable EATS, a company that provides catering, community outreach, and instruction services.
For the holiday, he would prepare two versions of candied yams. This, he said, shows how enslaved Africans, not finding the yams they were accustomed to on their native continent, substituted the North American sweet potato as a worthy alternative. The main dish would be jerk chicken, which gets its unique marinade and cooking method from the exchange of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people on what is now Jamaica.
“It’ll give an outlet and an opportunity to tell a story, and to connect food with culture,” Cleghorn said.
Similar to Shakur-DuVall, Cleghorn’s knowledge of Juneteenth is new, but he sees its growing popularity as a positive sign.
“It’s better representation. To me, it’s awareness,” Cleghorn said. “Awareness of our history here, and awareness of our history here in Boston.”
Unlike Shakur-DuVall and Cleghorn, Glorya Fernandez’s experience with Juneteenth spans decades. Fernandez, a Cambridge native, moved to Roxbury in the ‘90s and started attending the Juneteenth cookouts in nearby Franklin Park. The plates included the standard African American barbecue, served with maybe a Haitian rice and peas on the side.
“You can go around with the world and it’s just the same food stacked in something else,” she said.
Fernandez, who has Bajan, Cape Verdean, and African American roots, has some fond food memories of her aunt who ”could make Spam taste like steak,” and “make liver melt in your mouth.” But there are heavy ones, too, of her mother drowning her sorrows in tubs of ice cream, and her family members battling cancer and diabetes due to what she believes was poor diet.
“There’s a lot of work to be done, so I’m taking this opportunity and working with organizations like the Sierra Club, the farmers market, and in this position at the library to ignite people to investigate the nutrition and the food properties that they are ingesting,” said Fernandez, who serves as the Boston Public Library’s first chef-in-residence through its Nutrition Lab initiative.
Fernandez, who’s created her own business, gogobytes, to provide health-conscious culinary instruction and resources to Boston residents, uses her family’s knack for making flavorful food and nutritional knowledge to prepare plant-based dishes. And that’s exactly what she is doing for Juneteenth with black-eyed pea fritters. Take some carrots, black-eyed peas, maybe a little sweet potato for sweetness and red chilies for spice, and bind it all with flaxseed — “no eggs, no dairy.”
Then coat it in crumbs and fry it in avocado oil, “because that crisp just adds all kinds of heaven to your world,” Fernandez said.
Beyond the chance to introduce more nourishing food into people’s lives, Fernandez sees Juneteenth as a day to celebrate Black people’s humanity and their role as “the original people.”
“I’m excited to remind us. I’m excited to encourage us,” she said. “And I love a good party, girl.”
Tiana Woodard can be reached at tiana.woodard@globe.com. Follow her @tianarochon.
