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The recipe for family: Cooking as a gesture of love

The recipe for family: Cooking as a gesture of love

Nita Henry cooking

You could travel across the Earth and still be hard-pressed to find a culture that disagrees: Food and family go hand-in-hand. Whether you’re sitting around the kitchen table on a quiet Sunday evening, spending Christmas night at a Chinese restaurant, or cozying up with a significant other on the couch in front of the TV with pizza and popcorn, meals are an intimate experience, shared most often with those you love.

Over the holidays, that’s especially true. LGBT people sometimes put a unique spin on ‘family’ – less about biology, and more about love and close friends – but the sentiment remains.

Nita Mosby Henry grew up in the South – raised in Atlanta, where her earliest experiences of cooking began from watching her grandmother in the kitchen.

“Sometimes she allowed me to help,” Henry said. “I think that’s where the love came from. I love to cook, and I have no idea how to cook in small quantities,” she said with a laugh. “It ends up an excuse to have a party.”

Nita Henry cooking
Nita Henry

“I’m not afraid to experiment, but what I love is soul food.”

Soul Food – cuisine developed through generations by African-Americans in the South – is a tradition of abundance out of scarcity. Centuries of slavery followed by Jim Crow kept black Americans in poverty, left with the cheapest cuts of meat – like ham hocks and oxtail – and to plant crops – like sweet potatoes, green beans, greens, corn and okra – that could grow well in sweltering, humid Southern summers. Recipes passed down from generation to generation combined African, European and Caribbean influences into a tradition so rich and sentimental that even with modern adaptations, it continues to this day – the staple ingredients and recipes of soul food.

And for Henry, who loves to invite big groups over for regular Soul Food Sundays, the meal is an experience of dedication.

“I stay up the whole night cooking,” Henry said. “I don’t put it in containers; people get it from out on the stove.” Henry will invite about 20, or sometimes as many as 40, people to her home for the impressive meal. “I invite people who aren’t afraid to eat,” she said.

Henry, who is a lesbian, said the feeling of family is intrinsic to Soul Food Sundays.

“I do see it as a different kind of family. I have a daughter who’s 23, and when I was raising her, she was my family. But now if you substitute LGBT people for a traditional family, it’s the same feeling.”

“It’s some LGBT people, but a mixed group. It’s really racially diverse and financially diverse, gender diverse,” Henry said.

Henry, who has lived in Colorado for 18 years, invites her friends who don’t have family in the state each year for Thanksgiving “so they have somewhere to go,” she said.

That has become a tradition for her, along with Soul Food Sundays. “The people who come are usually younger than me, so they call me ‘gay mom,’” Henry said. “They’ll call me up and ask ‘when are you gonna have Soul Food Sunday?’”

An unexpected mishap last year gave Henry’s Thanksgiving tradition a new twist.

“My power went out about five minutes after we took the turkey out of the oven,” Henry said. “Thankfully all the cooking was done; I’m so blessed it happened after I was done cooking. I invited so many people over, I don’t know what I would have done if it had gone out earlier.”

The power stayed out the whole night, so Henry and her guests ate by candlelight. It was such a unique and enjoyable experience they decided they’d do it every year.

“I always do three meats – pot roast, the traditional Thanksgiving turkey and baked ham,” Henry said. “This year, I’m going to do a five-cheese macaroni, candied yams, collard greens, a dish that’s called black-eyed pea caviar, pound cake, key lime pies…” the list went on.

Henry’s partner is from Africa; she said, “I’m going to surprise her with a Nigerian dish.”

Of course, Henry couldn’t reveal what it will be – that would ruin the surprise.

But what she could reveal is plenty.

“Because soul food has so much love in it, I like to have some care for the people there. There’s too much work that goes into it for it not to go to people I care about,” Henry said. “I love to just sit back and watch while everyone eats.”

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