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Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl
Vibration Cooking was first published in 1970, not long after the term “soul food� gained common use. While critics were quick to categorize her as a proponent of soul food, Smart-Grosvenor wanted to keep the discussion of her cookbook/memoir focused on its message of food as a source of pride and validation of black womanhood and black “consciousness raising.”In 1959, at the age of nineteen, Smart-Grosvenor sailed to Europe, “where the bohemians lived and let live.� Among the cosmopolites of radical Paris, the Gullah girl from the South Carolina low country quickly realized that the most universal lingua franca is a well-cooked meal. As she recounts a cool cat’s nine lives as chanter, dancer, costume designer, and member of the Sun Ra Solar-Myth Arkestra, Smart-Grosvenor introduces us to a rich cast of characters. We meet Estella Smart, Vertamae’s grandmother and connoisseur of mountain oysters; Uncle Costen, who lived to be 112 and knew how to make Harriet Tubman Ragout; and Archie Shepp, responsible for Collard Greens à la Shepp, to name a few. She also tells us how poundcake got her a marriage proposal (she didn’t accept) and how she perfected omelettes in Paris, enchiladas in New Mexico, biscuits in Mississippi, and feijoida in Brazil. “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything,� writes Smart-Grosvenor. “I cook by vibration.”This edition features a foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson placing the book in historical context and discussing Smart-Grosvenor’s approach to food and culture. A new preface by the author details how she came to write Vibration Cooking.
First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor
4books21followersAs a world-renowned author, performer, and chef from rural South Carolina, Vertamae Smart- Grosvenor has led a remarkably unique and complex life. Born April 4, 1937 in Hampton County, she was strongly influenced by her African American Gullah Geechee community. She was also determined to follow her imaginaLon and creaLvity beyond the Lowcountry. At the age of 10, Vertamae Smart moved with her family to Philadelphia. Although her existence was largely sheltered, she established friendships with the future poet Larry Neal, and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Charles H. Fuller. There, she also met the up-and coming musician, Nina Simone who encouraged her move to Paris. Her basic knowledge of food preparaLon and Gullah culinary tradiLons would serve her well, as she embarked on her new journeys.
At the Beat Hotel, she found a colony of expat arLsts and writers � the ScoVsh folk singer Alex Campbell, the American writers Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and the French painter Lucien Fleury. She would meet and marry one of them, the sculptor Robert Grosvenor. In Paris, Verta Kali Smart, as she called herself, wrote arLcles about life at the Beat Hotel for theLe# Bank This Month, a short-lived publicaLon which she has also been credited with helping to produce. Bob and Vertamae would return to the U.S., se\ling in New York where she would find herself in the center of two American cultural movements. She bore two children, hosted parLes for arLsts and intellectuals, pursued her goal of acLng, and divorced. By 1963, she had embarked on a new journey that took her across the country and again across the ocean, as costume designer and sun-goddess for Sun-Ra’s mysLcal Arkestra. Back in the U.S., she published three books, including the criLcally acclaimed Vibra4on Cooking: The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl(1970), which has been called “the book that changed the nature of academic scholarship about women, race, and food.� She also pursued a career as a journalist for NaLonal Public Radio. In 1983, Grosvenor earned a Robert F. Kennedy Award and an Ohio State Award for her work on the documentary, “Dafuskie: Never Enough Too Soon.� In addiLon to her work on several notable films, she became a contribuLng writer for Essence, Ebony, Jet, Publishers Weekly and Redbook.
Today, at age seventy-seven, Grosvenor lives in an artist colony in Ridgeland, South Carolina. Surrounded by photographs and other historical ephemera documenLng her exceptional artistic life, Grosvenor is a treasure trove of stories about her experiences with some of the most influential artists, writers, actors, and musical performers of the twentieth century. Her long friendships with African American novelist and poet, Maya Angelou, and South African Jazz musician, Hugh Masekala, are examples of her wide circle of influential connecLons. Perhaps one of her most complex, yet fulfilling relationships was with the iconic musician and singer Nina Simone. With Simone, Grosvenor shared a deep friendship that ojen resembled sibling rivalry. Southern roots, love for family, and connecLons to Black culture kept the friendship between these creaLve women strong until Simone’s death in 2003.
At the Beat Hotel, she found a colony of expat arLsts and writers � the ScoVsh folk singer Alex Campbell, the American writers Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and the French painter Lucien Fleury. She would meet and marry one of them, the sculptor Robert Grosvenor. In Paris, Verta Kali Smart, as she called herself, wrote arLcles about life at the Beat Hotel for theLe# Bank This Month, a short-lived publicaLon which she has also been credited with helping to produce. Bob and Vertamae would return to the U.S., se\ling in New York where she would find herself in the center of two American cultural movements. She bore two children, hosted parLes for arLsts and intellectuals, pursued her goal of acLng, and divorced. By 1963, she had embarked on a new journey that took her across the country and again across the ocean, as costume designer and sun-goddess for Sun-Ra’s mysLcal Arkestra. Back in the U.S., she published three books, including the criLcally acclaimed Vibra4on Cooking: The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl(1970), which has been called “the book that changed the nature of academic scholarship about women, race, and food.� She also pursued a career as a journalist for NaLonal Public Radio. In 1983, Grosvenor earned a Robert F. Kennedy Award and an Ohio State Award for her work on the documentary, “Dafuskie: Never Enough Too Soon.� In addiLon to her work on several notable films, she became a contribuLng writer for Essence, Ebony, Jet, Publishers Weekly and Redbook.
Today, at age seventy-seven, Grosvenor lives in an artist colony in Ridgeland, South Carolina. Surrounded by photographs and other historical ephemera documenLng her exceptional artistic life, Grosvenor is a treasure trove of stories about her experiences with some of the most influential artists, writers, actors, and musical performers of the twentieth century. Her long friendships with African American novelist and poet, Maya Angelou, and South African Jazz musician, Hugh Masekala, are examples of her wide circle of influential connecLons. Perhaps one of her most complex, yet fulfilling relationships was with the iconic musician and singer Nina Simone. With Simone, Grosvenor shared a deep friendship that ojen resembled sibling rivalry. Southern roots, love for family, and connecLons to Black culture kept the friendship between these creaLve women strong until Simone’s death in 2003.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 4, 2017
(I had to read this groundbreaking book once I learned that filmmaker Julie Dash is working on a documentary about Vertamae Grosvenor titled “Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.�)
Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl was first published in 1970 but the edition I read was published in 1992. In the Introduction (from 1991) Dr. Grosvenor (she received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire) wrote about how publication of the book impacted her career as a “culinary griot� over the next 20 years---which included things like being featured on the cover of JET magazine; talking about cooking on television with “The Galloping Gourmet� (---you have to be a certain level of grown to remember him!); catering a party for James Baldwin; being featured in The New York Times Home section; participating in Philadelphia’s “The Book and the Cook� series; playing a hair-braider in Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust,� becoming a grandmother, and, more and more, deepening her vocation as a “culinary investigator.�
There is nothing conventional about this book in terms of writing style, content, or how its “recipes� are organized. But through food the author issues commentary on cultural differences, racial attitudes, the gourmet food movement, overly-processed foods, and the inferior groceries often found in urban food stores (and this was in 1970!) The book is filled with references and sayings from her early years growing up in South Carolina as a member of the Geechee, or Gullah, culture; as well as terms from the 1960s, like when she acknowledges that someone’s attitude was “uptight, � saying that folks “dug� her cooking; or using expressions such as “everything is everything,� and “different strokes for different folks.� You have to be confident with your own abilities in the kitchen because none of the recipes include any measurement indicators. As Dr. Grosvenor writes, “I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.� She advocates cooking with the freshest foodstuffs in very black, well-seasoned skillets, and using peanut oil for all manner of browning, sauteing, and frying.
Vibration Cooking talks about cooking and eating with family and friends in places like South Carolina, Mississippi, Paris, Brazil, and New Mexico; with black folks and white folks, with musicians, and in hospitals. An abbreviated list of folk with whom she “broke bread� includes Barbara Walters, Nina Simone, Jonathan Kozol, Sun Ra, Quincy Troupe, Ed Bradley, Margaret Walker, and Mari Evans. The stories, letters, and poems that accompany her culinary adventures had me laughing, rolling my eyes with disbelief and covering my mouth with my hand (as in “ooooooooo!�) Some recipes are named after historical figures as well as contemporary friends. Some examples: “Harriet Tubman Ragout,� “Collard Greens A La Shepp,� (after Archie Shepp), and “Eddie’s Mama’s Pig Feet.� A few recipes seemed more poetic tongue-in-cheek than something one might actually eat to nourish the body.
Everything feels so randomly put together, I had to “un-bunch my panties”a few times while reading---if you know what I mean---because the book wasn’t intended to be a scholarly document composed in a linear fashion and I kept forgetting that. For instance, a recipe for COOKING collard greens is followed by the procedure for CLEANING collard greens. A recipe for lye soap precedes recipes for brains rolled in flour and browned in oil, and something called “liver and lights.�
Vertamae Grosvenor had no idea that the book would be published. Like she says in her Introduction: “I wrote it because I wanted to do something creative. My daughters were young and I couldn’t afford to take a class in anything or pay a sitter. My creative activity would have to be done in the house. Writing seemed like the perfect thing. I wasn’t a writer but people said they enjoyed my letters and besides, I was not writing to be published. I was writing to express myself. I loved to cook, had great food memories and experiences with friends and family in various places, so why not write about that. Put everything down and on special occasions give a copy of “writings� to the people I talked about.�
It seems that some new chapters were added for the 1992 edition but there is no clear indication, dates-wise. You just turn to a page and realize that one of her daughters is in college or Jimmy Carter is the President!
Well, I was going to rate it 3 stars but now that I’ve written so much to recommend it I guess I have to give it four stars!
Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl was first published in 1970 but the edition I read was published in 1992. In the Introduction (from 1991) Dr. Grosvenor (she received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire) wrote about how publication of the book impacted her career as a “culinary griot� over the next 20 years---which included things like being featured on the cover of JET magazine; talking about cooking on television with “The Galloping Gourmet� (---you have to be a certain level of grown to remember him!); catering a party for James Baldwin; being featured in The New York Times Home section; participating in Philadelphia’s “The Book and the Cook� series; playing a hair-braider in Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust,� becoming a grandmother, and, more and more, deepening her vocation as a “culinary investigator.�
There is nothing conventional about this book in terms of writing style, content, or how its “recipes� are organized. But through food the author issues commentary on cultural differences, racial attitudes, the gourmet food movement, overly-processed foods, and the inferior groceries often found in urban food stores (and this was in 1970!) The book is filled with references and sayings from her early years growing up in South Carolina as a member of the Geechee, or Gullah, culture; as well as terms from the 1960s, like when she acknowledges that someone’s attitude was “uptight, � saying that folks “dug� her cooking; or using expressions such as “everything is everything,� and “different strokes for different folks.� You have to be confident with your own abilities in the kitchen because none of the recipes include any measurement indicators. As Dr. Grosvenor writes, “I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.� She advocates cooking with the freshest foodstuffs in very black, well-seasoned skillets, and using peanut oil for all manner of browning, sauteing, and frying.
Vibration Cooking talks about cooking and eating with family and friends in places like South Carolina, Mississippi, Paris, Brazil, and New Mexico; with black folks and white folks, with musicians, and in hospitals. An abbreviated list of folk with whom she “broke bread� includes Barbara Walters, Nina Simone, Jonathan Kozol, Sun Ra, Quincy Troupe, Ed Bradley, Margaret Walker, and Mari Evans. The stories, letters, and poems that accompany her culinary adventures had me laughing, rolling my eyes with disbelief and covering my mouth with my hand (as in “ooooooooo!�) Some recipes are named after historical figures as well as contemporary friends. Some examples: “Harriet Tubman Ragout,� “Collard Greens A La Shepp,� (after Archie Shepp), and “Eddie’s Mama’s Pig Feet.� A few recipes seemed more poetic tongue-in-cheek than something one might actually eat to nourish the body.
Everything feels so randomly put together, I had to “un-bunch my panties”a few times while reading---if you know what I mean---because the book wasn’t intended to be a scholarly document composed in a linear fashion and I kept forgetting that. For instance, a recipe for COOKING collard greens is followed by the procedure for CLEANING collard greens. A recipe for lye soap precedes recipes for brains rolled in flour and browned in oil, and something called “liver and lights.�
Vertamae Grosvenor had no idea that the book would be published. Like she says in her Introduction: “I wrote it because I wanted to do something creative. My daughters were young and I couldn’t afford to take a class in anything or pay a sitter. My creative activity would have to be done in the house. Writing seemed like the perfect thing. I wasn’t a writer but people said they enjoyed my letters and besides, I was not writing to be published. I was writing to express myself. I loved to cook, had great food memories and experiences with friends and family in various places, so why not write about that. Put everything down and on special occasions give a copy of “writings� to the people I talked about.�
It seems that some new chapters were added for the 1992 edition but there is no clear indication, dates-wise. You just turn to a page and realize that one of her daughters is in college or Jimmy Carter is the President!
Well, I was going to rate it 3 stars but now that I’ve written so much to recommend it I guess I have to give it four stars!
June 20, 2020
I love Verta! This book is a memoir based in food where recipes collapse out from different memories, with some parts being more recipe heavy and others less so. I loved learning about Verta and everything she experienced and everyone she met on her way, as well as about the food - aside from the recipes her knowledge of food history is very deep. Her descriptions of her many encounters with what we now would call Karens (like a white American woman in France telling Verta that she’s a Black American so she can’t wear African clothes) are the parts that I can’t get out of my head. An unconventional book and worthwhile read.
August 26, 2017
This woman had a helluva life. And her writing is on point! I laughed with her; I got mad when she was mad. I really loved her unapologetic Blackness throughout the book. And her respect for the cultures of others.
This book was rich. And a fun, "easy to relate to" read. I have no regrets, except waiting so long to read it. I need to jot down some of these recipes, too!
This book was rich. And a fun, "easy to relate to" read. I have no regrets, except waiting so long to read it. I need to jot down some of these recipes, too!
February 10, 2025
meh
It’s an old cookbook directions are cook until done and season.
Season with what exactly? lol salt! Pepper? Thyme? Cajun? Sazon?
It’s an old cookbook directions are cook until done and season.
Season with what exactly? lol salt! Pepper? Thyme? Cajun? Sazon?
April 12, 2020
An excellent memoir/cookbook mashup. It was all over the place and I really liked that.
March 6, 2019
This is a writer in control of her voice--writing about Southern food, Geechee food, soul food as she conceives of it, not as a monolithic expression of everything black people cook, but as a nuanced travelogue of the many landscapes, histories, places of control and lack of control in which culinary innovation take place. I do wonder how much of Smart-Grosvenor's narrative is governed by the idea of rebuking standard culinary knowledge--not just the framing of recipes and why they matter, but also the relevance of personal experiences to the recipes. When she maps what she cooks in France against what she cooks in the South versus in New York, she isn't doing it to pin recipes to a map, but rather to imagine multiple geographies and expressions overlapping within her. She pushes back against notions of traditional culinary authority by pointing to taste, cooking by vibration, as a guiding force, and in doing so forces us to think about food beyond the bounds of the kitchen, cookbook, or recipe, outside the bounds of the orderly, consumption-driven world. (Her dig on culinary authority on page xxvii is interesting "White folks act like they invented food and like there is some weird mystique surrounding it--something that only Julia and Jim can get to.") She partly does this by transcending geographies, leaping from hoe cakes to crepes in a single bound. (16) This serves to undermine the authority of Western cooking (important to note how foreign food only feels that way to the foreigner, 66), but also to uphold a sense of authority that comes from within oneself. She makes these critiques by eliding even sentence structure, running straight from one story into an associated recipe as a way of winking to her true feelings, i.e. moving from a description of racial nomenclature into a discussion of French people, into a recipe for frogs. (76). She also does this by pushing back against how culinary skill is read--as something only to secure a man (19) or something to provision for a family. She also refuses to adhere to standard chronology, intermingling the story of her great-grandfather burning his "free pass" for love right alongside her argument against the draft (22-23). But perhaps the best part of her writing is how we can track her state of mind through the skipping of focus--that she can move from her dinner parties in Paris to a few stray thoughts on Jonathan Kozol and school reform, then back to dinner parties again. (56-57). What she alludes to is actually a way of seeing her own logic as a writer and historian, philosophizing about what makes taste, authority, education & history side by side.
Side note: great foreword in the 2011 edition by Psyche Williams-Forson.
Side note: great foreword in the 2011 edition by Psyche Williams-Forson.
August 24, 2020
0% what I expected. The back says we meet people who inspired recipes and learn about Smart-Grosvenor’s travels. Well, you don't learn much about them over what's said on the back of the book. And the recipes are very bare bones. But that doesn't mean it's not an excellent memoir of what it was like to be Black and cook in the 50s/60s (first edition published in 1970), and honestly the afterwords are worth everything.
December 30, 2020
I like to read cookbooks as through they are novels. Thus I really love cookbook memoirs. I suspect this was way ahead of its time since it was originally written on 1970. While I cannot say I was totally inspired to cook anything, I can say I appreciated the wonderful expression of cooking and food in family culture. We each have our own food history. And I especially enjoyed reading hers.
April 28, 2021
In Paris I used to eat what they called crepes ... delicate to make and you have to have an expensive and fancy pan to make them. I prefer hoe cake like Grandmama Sula used to make ... Hoe cake got its name from the hoe. Slaves would cook batter on the flat edge of the hoe in the fields for the noonday meal. You don't have to cook it on the metal part of the hoe cause we ain't slaves no mo'. [p.16]
For the 'Cookbook by a Woman of Colour' prompt of the I wanted a cookbook that was more than just a collection of recipes, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's 1970 Vibration Cooking was highly recommended. I even bought a paperback, rather than an ebook!
This was a book to dip into at intervals, rather than read straight through. The author had already lived a colourful life in her first three decades: born in South Carolina, her family moved to Philadelphia, then Vertamae went to Paris (via Dover, where she pretended to be an African princess) to study theatre, before moving to New York City and becoming an actress and a member of Sun Ra's Solar-Myth Arkestra. (Later, she would have a small role in the film of Toni Morrison's .) She was friends with Maya Angelou and Nina Simone: the book is peopled with her other friends, passing on recipes, talking about food, eating and drinking. Wherever Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor went, she was fascinated by food and how it reflects culture.
I learnt that 'Geechee' is another name for 'Gullah', the term for African-Americans who live in the south-east US and have a creole language and a distinct ethnic identity. Smart-Grosvenor, born into this culture, defines herself as Black and Afro-American: she embraces her African roots and notes that she was treated with more respect in Europe when wearing African clothes than when wearing 'Western' clothes. She writes of 'soul food' but does not equate it with 'food that has been cooked by black hands': "any Veau à la Flamande or Blinchishe's Tvorogom I prepared was as 'soulful' as a pair of candied yams". And she highlights culinary cultural appropriation, whether it's the gourmet adoption of collard greens or terrapins or pigs' feet, all of which were staples of African-American cuisine for decades if not centuries.
This was an interesting read, though mostly for the stories between the recipes -- and the glimpses of a recent, more prejudiced past -- rather than the recipes themselves. That said, though I'm not an enthusiastic cook, I intend to try her recipe for 'Codfish and Ackee Jamaica Style'.
November 17, 2017
So sassy and real. Cookbook/memoir that is *so* much more than "soul food." "When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything," she writes. "I cook by vibration."
June 30, 2020
Anyone who considers writing and wants a study in voice should turn to the genre-defying work of Ms. Smart-Grosvenor.
August 30, 2020
The book had me nodding my head in some place and cracking up in others. Highly recommend!
June 1, 2021
I ~loved~ this memoir/cookbook. LOVED.
October 19, 2022
"I never travel without a couple of bags of black-eyed peas in my suitcase." p 153
December 13, 2022
What cookbooks should look like 💚
Read
February 24, 2023A Taste of History Culinary Book Club selection for February 2023.
December 26, 2024
Astonishing how much can be said in a cookbook...brilliant!
February 1, 2025
Fun book! It's not really a cookbook. The best way I can describe it is a mix of Maya Angelou, Bobby Seale, and Maya Angelou, and MFK Fisher
July 2, 2020
Good to the last drop
Funny & quick read. Highly recommend especially if you’re looking to learn more about the culture of Geechee & the history there.
Funny & quick read. Highly recommend especially if you’re looking to learn more about the culture of Geechee & the history there.
September 3, 2008
Verta Mae Grosvenor hails from Fairfax, South Carolina. As an actress, a mother, an NPR commentator, and all-round adventuress, her travels have taken her from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Paris and beyond. Everywhere she has gone, she has been accompanied by memorable dishes, many of which have recipes in this book.
Unlike in most cookbooks, the many of the recipes here do not have quantities listed: instead, Verta Mae counsels cooking by vibration. Add the amount of an ingredient that feels right to you. For cakes and cookies and a few other recipes where quantities are important, they are included.
Unlike in most cookbooks, the many of the recipes here do not have quantities listed: instead, Verta Mae counsels cooking by vibration. Add the amount of an ingredient that feels right to you. For cakes and cookies and a few other recipes where quantities are important, they are included.
November 17, 2016
While this book has little in the way of real cooking information, it is a great read simply for the fact that African American women have been given so little attention in any aspect of literature. I bought it for food knowledge, and left knowing more about the socio-economic trials and dealings of a Black woman in the 70's. Good stuff.
April 19, 2025
March 15, 2025: It has now been almost a year since I read this book in preparation for a trip to Charleston, South Carolina. Verta Mae has stayed with me all this time. Every time I cook up something good from scratch with whatever I have on hand, I announce, "It's Verta Mae and her vibration cooking!"
April 29, 2025
Definitely found myself enamored with Vertamae's musings, but left a little cold with more so the memoir parts of the book. Still full of novelty and spirit, but the writing was a little plain in some bits. Some truly unique recipes, many I want to try out (craving poundcake and "third-world" coffee), and even some Old South plant/spice knowledge for cooking and healing.
December 2, 2021
Vertamae does an exquisite job blending her cookbook with her autobiography. This eclectic format discusses her blackness in a unique and profound way. I loved her humor and emotion. She truly is a griot!
February 19, 2011
Reading this will bring out your soul.
October 27, 2012
Really enjoyed this genre-crossing book.
September 6, 2015
Beautiful book. One of the first cooking/food books I've purchased on my own.
January 16, 2017
it was fun to read about the author's travels and cooking
April 1, 2017
Imagine if Zora Neal Hurston wrote a cook book... Vertamae Smart- Grosvenor is that genius culinary griot worth her weight in salt.
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