The Chef Bryant Terry on How To “Blackify” Fennel

'Bryant Terry is a chef, educator, food-justice activist, and cookbook author. He joined Helen Rosner virtually to cook a dish from his book Vegetable Kingdom: citrus and garlic-herb braised fennel. The dish calls for marinating the bulb in mojo, a citrus-juice-based Cuban condiment more typically applied to meat. Terry says that he wants to “blackify” vegetables, as part of his project to “uplift” Black culinary traditions from the global African diaspora. In culinary school, he was disappointed by the emphasis on classical European techniques. “One of the things I feel like I’ve been fighting since starting this work,” Terry told Rosner, “is pushing against reductive ways people imagine, think about, [and] talk about Black food.”