Kwanzaa, food go hand in hand

Listen to Ingrid Allen describe the gumbo she makes for her family's Kwanzaa feast, and you get an enticing sense of the holiday.

"You have boudin sausage, crab, fish, chicken, tomatoes, okra, peppers, onions, different seasonings," she said, a platter of the hearty stew steaming on the table next to her.

"It's like a family in a pot. Everything just comes together, and it's beautiful when it's done."

Kwanzaa, the annual, weeklong celebration honoring African heritage and culture, begins Friday. Locally, the Capital City Kwanzaa Festival gets under way Saturday.

Food plays a primary role in the observance of Kwanzaa, which means "first fruits of the harvest." The pinnacle in many households is a feast, or karumu, held Dec. 31.

Dishes vary from home to home, but almost everything that's prepared has meaning related to the holiday or, more simply, to the gathering of family and friends.

"Kwanzaa is really about bringing a lot of different dishes to the table and everybody sharing with each other," said Allen, who teaches culinary arts at the Richmond Technical Center and operates a catering business, Ingrid's Food for the Soul.

"It's just bringing love to the table."

Allen's table will be surrounded by love -- her daughter, Jessica, in the Army is home on leave from Iraq, and her sons, Jerrod and Sherrod, are home from college -- and laden with dozens of dishes: gumbo, jambalaya, collard greens, jalof rice (which she calls her holiday rice), macaroni and cheese with tomatoes, cornbread. Then there are the cakes: butterscotch chocolate, coconut-pineapple-mango and her version of fruitcake, which she created from ingredients she happened to have on hand when she was in a pinch before a festival a few years ago.

"Fruitcake is a traditional African wedding cake, but fruitcake is also for any special occasion," Allen said over lunch at Croaker's Spot, a restaurant at Second and Leigh streets in Jackson Ward that she baked cakes for. "I do mine a little bit differently, using tropical fruits in it."

Allen says she usually has so many people over for the Kwanzaa feast that the guests arrive in shifts and stay late. Dinner might start in early afternoon, and the gathering -- and eating -- might not break up until the next morning.

"Cooking is like breathing to me," she said. "If I'm not cooking, I'm not living. It's my passion. And I love watching my family eat."

. . .

"This," said Maat Free, standing in her North Side kitchen and spooning up bowls of raw kale, tomatoes and olives, "is Sister Free's Red, Black and Green."

Red, black and green, besides being the colors of the black nationalist movement, have great symbolism for those of African heritage.

The red, Free said, represents "the blood of our people." Black is "for our skin and green for the land of Africa."

It's a natural dish for Kwanzaa, but it's so good, Free makes it year-round.

On a recent evening, Free prepared the dishes she plans to make for her Kwanzaa feast, which she will share with the Richmond Kwanzaa Kollective, a coalition of grass-roots organizations, at a potluck meal Dec. 31. Besides the kale, she made a couscous dish with diced vegetables, bean pies and chickpeas yassa.

Yassa is a Senegalese dish Free became acquainted with at a Taste of Afrika, a former restaurant on Main Street in Richmond, operated by a friend, Mamadou Ndao, known to many as Mohammed.

"The first time I tasted it, it brought tears to my eyes," Free said. "He put his soul in it."

Ndao died before Free was able to get the recipe for yassa, so she went online to find one. It's spiced with mustard and often made with chicken, but she modified it to include chickpeas instead of meat. How she came up with her yassa recipe speaks to the way many Kwanzaa-related foods evolve, she said.

"You've got to go with your heart," said Free. "Just keep messing with it until you like it."

Free, the mother of three daughters who has worked as a caterer and a violin teacher, views Kwanzaa through the lens of Lukumi, a Latin expression of a West African spiritual tradition. She dressed all in white as a symbol of purity during her initiation into her faith's priesthood.

Free plays electric violin in her band, The Blacktastics, (http://www.myspace.com/freerocksviolin), which will perform as the last act at the Capital City Kwanzaa Festival on Saturday at The Showplace. She's written a Kwanzaa song The Blacktastics will perform for the occasion.

The music, the lighting of candles and other rituals are important aspects of Kwanzaa.

But, said Free, "If you didn't have the food, it just wouldn't be Kwanzaa." Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .