MoAD Hosts ‘High on the Hog’ Author for a Blowout Dinner

Long before Netflix released High on the Hog, its award-winning food docu-series based on Dr. Jessica B. Harris’ book of the same name, Harris herself was already a living legend. Food historian, author of a dozen classic cookbooks and unofficial poet laureate of yams, okra and black-eyed peas, Harris literally wrote the book on how diasporic African foodways shaped America. When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture was planning its new cafeteria a few years back, Harris was the one the museum tapped to help conceptualize the menu.

And so, when San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora had to pick a featured speaker for this year’s splashy “Diaspora Dinner,” the museum’s signature fundraising event, inviting Harris was a no-brainer.

On Saturday, May 4, Harris will take the stage at MoAD for a conversation about the history of diasporic African food, moderated by chef Adrian Lipscombe. The talk will be the highlight of a blowout dinner featuring dishes from Harris’s cookbooks — all cooked under the supervision of MoAD chef-in-residence Jocelyn Jackson, who calls Harris “an incredible icon” to the Black community.

According to Harris, one of the main reasons she decided to write High on the Hog in the first place was because in her cookbooks, “the headnotes for the recipes kept getting longer and longer, which indicated that there was more to be said.”

She has seen a late-career revival after producers Fabienne Toback and Karis Jagger optioned the High on the Hog for Netflix, introducing her work to a new generation. Like the book that inspired it, the show (which recently released a second season) takes viewers on a journey from the open-air markets of Benin, in West Africa, to the rice fields of South Carolina, the barbecue pits of Texas and beyond. It’s a culinary history that’s intertwined with the suffering that enslaved Africans faced — but also their resilience and ingenuity in maintaining their connection to Africa.

The menu for MoAD’s Diaspora Dinner will also reflect that journey. While Jackson is keeping most of it a secret, she says one dish she plans to serve is acaraje, a Brazilian black-eyed pea fritter that’s usually stuffed with smoked shellfish and fried in palm oil. As Harris notes, it’s a dish that traces its roots back to southwestern Nigeria, where they eat a white bean fritter called akara.

“The bean has changed, but the oil remains red palm oil,” Harris explains. “There’s a lot of history in that.”

Ultimately, Harris’s vision of the future of food and community for the African diaspora is refreshingly hopeful. She sees young, Black fine-dining chefs using their training to find new ways to connect to their cultures, and she says, “Change is the most wonderful thing about food.”

Even as she acknowledges the way that a city like San Francisco has seen a tremendous exodus of its Black population, Harris urges us to take an even broader view: “Yes, it’s displacement — but it is such a slim displacement in proportion to the ultimate displacement, which was the one from the African continent.”

“We will find ways to come together,” she says. “The communing of sitting at or around a table is cardinal to our existence — I think that is not going to be diminished. It may evolve, but it’s there.”

MoAD’s annual Diaspora Dinner will take place at the museum (685 Mission St., San Francisco) and the adjacent St. Regis Hotel on Saturday, May 4, from 6–9 p.m. General admission tickets are sold out at this time, but a handful of VIP tickets, which include a private meet-and-greet, are still available.