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A Pie Made With Onions — and Good Vibes

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Onion PieCredit...Davide Luciano for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Alex Brannian.

She would go on to travel the world with bags of dried black-eyed peas in her suitcase, but when Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was 19, living in a hotel on the Left Bank, she wasn’t yet in the habit. She hadn’t imagined that in Paris she’d have trouble finding something as vital as black-eyed peas.

But she did. And because Smart-Grosvenor wasn’t just a brilliant cook but also a writer, she knew how to turn an unsuccessful trip to the grocery store into a tale about identity and blackness, about superstition and appetite, about who she was and who she was becoming (a woman who packed her own dang black-eyed peas).

In one version, published in The New York Times in 1977, she wrote: “I would offer a pork chop sandwich to Muhammad Ali sooner than I would point my finger at a grave, open an umbrella in the house or not eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. Why? Because my heart and my roots are planted on the Ogeechee River in Georgia and in the lowlands of South Carolina.”

The story’s headline was a mash-up of French and Gullah, which she’d spoken since she was a child in Fairfax, S.C., where she was born in 1937. “Yenna Wanna Nyam Avec Moi?” She gave her translation at the end of the article. “Do You Want to Eat With Me?”

The answer was yes, always yes. Smart-Grosvenor thought of cooking as creative work, right up there with making music and art. In Paris, starting in the late 1950s, she made what she liked, which was home cooking from her actual home as well as all over the world — smothered rabbit and cornmeal mush, salade niçoise and feijoada. She cooked for James Baldwin, David Bowie, Nina Simone, Miles Davis. When she published her first cookbook, “Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl,” in 1970, Smart-Grosvenor was 33.

I didn’t know food writing could sound like that, is what I thought, over and over, the first time I read it. It was a cookbook, sure, but all the way through, Smart-Grosvenor shifted from memoir to recipe, often without breaking the flow of a sentence. She embroidered her stories with politics, sarcasm, romance and family mythology, defining the food-memoir genre as we now know it.

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A copy of “Vibration Cooking” from 1970.Credit...Jessica Tang for The New York Times

“White folks act like they invented food,” she wrote in 1970, before culinary appropriation was the subject of panels at conferences. Here she is tasting andouillette, a French sausage made with pig intestines, laughing at the fetishization of offal: “So these people order for me and they are just on pins and needles, dying, really dying for me to taste this enjoyable rare dish. Well thank you Jesus the food arrives and it ain’t nothing but CHITTERLINGS in the form of a sausage.”

Paris was still a kind of magic because Smart-Grosvenor loved the theater, and she had been mesmerized by the work of Josephine Baker, but her andouillette story (and her black-eyed peas story; she found them eventually) was about how Europe, and whiteness, simply wasn’t the most important frame of reference, culinary or otherwise. In her own stories, she was right at the center, where she belonged.

Smart-Grosvenor had two children and married twice. In 1977, when Ebony magazine asked why she hadn’t married again, she said, “I want to be excellent in everything I do.” She did a lot: acted in films, sang backup for Sun Ra, reported for NPR. She landed on the cover of Jet magazine. She wrote poetry and hosted an award-winning cooking show on PBS.

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor died last month, at 79. That day, all I wanted was to hear her voice. In my kitchen, I leaned a speaker in an open cupboard and listened to some old NPR segments of hers while I did dishes and poked around for ingredients. Her voice came in so clear, reporting from Daufuskie Island, or talking with Alice Walker in her home. She explained her method for making a collard-green sandwich with prosciutto, thinly sliced onion and tomato, which sounded perfect, but I didn’t have any tomatoes.

I had onions, so I made her onion pie — a savory custard baked in a pastry shell from “Vibration Cooking.” I’d almost forgotten that Smart-Grosvenor did not particularly like to measure, or time. Precise direction wasn’t her style. As a recipe writer, she often gave you the leanest, most basic directions, and never coddled. (Here is her recipe for Irish coffee: “Add some whisky.”)

She said to let the onions become translucent, which was pretty straightforward: I was careful not to let them brown. But I wondered if by a “hot oven” she meant 350 or 400 degrees. And should the pastry be blind-baked? I muddled my way through and ended up with a plain, beautiful pie that tasted even better the next day, chilled, when the custard turned creamy and dense and the onions mellowed.

With Smart-Grosvenor, it was never just about food. What she wanted was for people to feel their own way through their kitchens, and through their lives, to not be ruled by the authority of a recipe, or by any kind of authority. “I just do it by vibration,” she wrote, explaining the title of her book, the one in which she changed the course of her life by telling her story. “Different strokes for different folks. Do your thing your way.”

Recipe: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Onion Pie

A correction was made on 
Oct. 30, 2016

The Eat column on Oct. 16, about the writer and chef Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, misidentified the state where Smart-Grosvenor was born. She was from Fairfax, S.C., not Fairfax, Va.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 30 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Good Vibration. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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