Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (April 4, 1937 – September 3, 2016) was an American culinary anthropologist, griot, poet, food writer, and broadcaster on public media.
Born into a Gullah family in the Low Country of South Carolina, she moved with them as a child to Philadelphia during the Great Migration.
She was known for her cookbook-memoir, Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970), and published numerous essays and articles.
She grew up speaking Gullah, as her parents' families had been in the area for centuries and were part of that ethnic group and culture.
In this area, Africans were concentrated in large populations on relatively isolated Sea Island plantations and in the Low Country; they developed a unique creole culture and language with strong ties to Africa.
"[3] In 1958, at the age of 19, Smart took off for Paris, France, intending to pursue theater[3] in the bohemian circles of Europe.
In Paris, she recognized that a Senegalese woman selling food on the street was using techniques she knew from her family and the Low Country cuisine.
[3] She eventually settled in New York City, where she pursued acting, making it to Broadway, where she played Big Pearl in Mandingo.
[5] She was attracted to the Black Arts Movement and its artists, including Nikki Giovanni and Leroi Jones, both of whom she refers to in Vibration Cooking.
For three years, she was a chanter, dancer, costume designer, member, and often cook of Sun Ra's Solar-Myth Arkestra.
[6] She was the host of the radio shows Seasonings, a series of holiday specials on food, cooking, and culture, which won a James Beard Award in 1996 for Best Radio Show;[7] and The Americas' Family Kitchen on PBS,[8][9] which led to a television spinoff called Vertamae Cooks.
Through her prose and her recipes, she writes of her travels, her experiences as a black woman in America (especially New York City) and abroad, and her life as influenced and shaped by food.
Grosvenor preaches food's ability to nourish, to connect people, to cross regional boundaries, to feel like home, to be a mode of self-expression, to be improvisational and adaptational, and to tell stories.
"Soul food," aka black folks' eats, was said to have developed out of master's leftovers ... Education is the key.
In the introduction to the book's 1986 edition, Grosvenor writes: My feeling was/is any Veau à la Flamande or Blinchishe's Tvorogom I prepared was as 'soulful' as a pair of candied yams.
"[12]The book addresses gentrification of cuisine and the classification as "gourmet" of foods that have long been a part of African-American cookery, such as collards and terrapins.
She writes about her own experiences of being discriminated against as a black woman and her frustrations with the oversimplification and pigeonholing of African-American cooking.
[3] In 2015, filmmaker Julie Dash, known for her film Daughters of the Dust, about Gullah culture in the early 20th century, launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise money to continue her production of a documentary about Grosvenor entitled Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.
[16] After suffering an aneurysm in 2009, Smart-Growsvenor spent her days in Palm Key, South Carolina, a private island near her birth town.