by Frank Matheis based on interviews with Phil and Martha Wiggins
Phil explained the importance of food to him and his music[1]:
“It’s all about the house party and it goes all the way back to the African aesthetic of music being part of life; music is not entertainment. Music is part of life – just like eating and sleeping and drinking water. So before Piedmont blues was put on the stage it was what people did in their own home while they were eating, while they were celebrating. I remember being at John’s house and we’d be playing music in the kitchen while people were cooking and we’d eat a bite or two between songs. It was just part of life. It wasn’t like it was a performance. Music was part of the party. So food – and the music –is part of celebration, and celebration includes music, dancing, eating, laughing, talking, arguing, getting things straight, telling the truth, telling lies, having fun, having conflict – all that is part of the celebration of blues. And food is a big part of it. It’s just like you play some, you eat some, and then you play some more.
Everybody had a garden. Everybody grew fresh vegetables. John Cephas had field cress and and creasy greens – and also fresh corn and then we baked cornbread. Potatoes –cooked potatoes, plus potato salads – all those kinds of things. People lived in the rural areas. The so called Soul Food was developed by people living in bondage and having to make the best of what was left over, what was given to them after the white people were done and took all the good parts of the meat. For instance, black folks did not get the best cuts of the ham and what was left was the ham hock and the chitterlings, and the things that were basically thrown away. African American people had to figure out how to make the best of those things, and they did. A lot of that is what you will find on menus in real fancy restaurants is something that Africans and African Americans figured out… okay, so it’s really tough meat, so let’s just cook it really slow on really low heat for a long time, and you’ll wind up with something that’s really tender and flavorful.
That’s how we developed soul food specialties. We typically had beans and rice and greens for New Years, called Hoppin’ John, but we always had black-eyed peas and greens for New Year’s. Hogshead was a thing for Christmas.
I like to cook what they call “peasant food”. I like to cook dishes where you wind up putting a lot of different things in the pot and it takes a while for the flavors to bloom. So you put in your celery and your onions and your garlic and all, and then it starts to slowly develop. A lot of the dishes actually taste better the next day as leftovers. I like to cook poultry. I’ve been fortunate to have traveled a lot in my life – starting as a kid and growing up in a military family. I like the traditional African American dishes, like black-eyed peas and ham hocks and cornbread, stuff like that, and I cook a couple of African dishes like brown nut stew with poultry. In Africa the meat was not the main thing. The meat was more like seasoning, because it wasn’t that easy to come by. Brown nut stew is made of chicken and greens and onions and ground peanuts. For African food you use different spices that would be considered here as baking spices, like cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and allspice. And you make a chicken broth. It’s like a stew and it’s wonderful.
I also cook arroz con pollo, a South American dish with roast chicken and you make broth and it’s got olives and pimentos in it and garlic and lots of onion and rice and chorizo sausage. So you put all that in with the rice, and as it cooks down the flavors really start to bloom. In all these dishes you take simple ingredients and you take your time. You may not have a lot of money to buy a lot of ingredients, but you have the time. I’ve always felt like for me that it’s not so much that you spend a lot of money on food but that you spend time preparing it well. That’s what makes the difference and that’s what makes good food to me.
I also make my own hot sauce. The main ingredient I like to use is habanero peppers – which I grow behind my building. I usually plant about eight plants a year, and it gives me enough to make a couple dozen jars of jerk sauce, which I got from my first trip to Jamaica. We were traveling along going from Kingston on our way to Montego Bay and we stopped by the side of the road at this kind of little shack where this woman was selling jerk chicken and jerk sauce. I wanted extra jerk sauce, so I took my spoon and stuck it in the jar and the lady said, “That’s hot.” I said I’m used to hot, and so I put it on my food and it lit my mouth on fire and she just looked at me and laughed and said, “Hah, I warned you.” So I was like – I have got to find what those ingredients are. So the first thing I had to figure out was habanero peppers. They’re what we call scotch bonnet peppers, which they use a lot in the Caribbean but also a lot in Africa. It’s got a very distinctive taste that I had never had before. So that’s the main ingredient to jerk sauce. Then allspice, brown sugar – or sometimes I’ll use molasses – a combination of spring onions and Vidalia onions. I use lime juice, a little bit of pineapple juice, and the baking spices– a little nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves in there. It makes a really thick sauce. If I’m cooking with it I’ll either use it direct, or I’ll thin it down some with more lime juice and more pineapple juice to make a marinade. That’s my jerk sauce, and then I’ll make a straight hot sauce with habaneros and vinegar and water and a little salt and garlic and ginger. And that’s how I make a hot sauce.”
Phil’s daughter Martha Faith Wiggins is now a James Beard award nominated chef in the famed New Orleans restaurant Sylvians. She explained her father’s influence on her love for cooking[2]:
“ I believe that I’ve taken after my dad’s passion for the things he loves and enjoys in life and the things he thinks are beautiful. It’s very sentimental for him. He’s a very affectionate person. He’s an emotional guy, and I think that that is definitely embodied in the way he treats the things that he loves, and he loves music and he loves food. Those are the things that stand out the most, and especially have most rubbed off on me. So growing up my father traveled all over the world with John Cephas. My dad is also a very impressionable person. He loves everyone’s culture and he wants to know as much about it as possible and become completely enthralled in it, whether it be food or music. So if he went to a country he would become obsessed with their food and their music or their instruments and want to bring that home. So, whether it be making a arroz con polloif he went to Spain or bringing home a talking drum from Africa, or a mandolin, or bringing home a wok – and then for the next few months we’ll eat everything cooked in a wok. That’s definitely influenced a lot of the things that I grew up eating, and a general curiosity and appreciation for other people’s culture, and everything about it – what they eat and the instruments they play and also the tradition of passing down traditional arts through teaching and word of mouth and through elders passing things down instead of on paper. So, that’s definitely influenced me a lot. When he was home, he had the opportunity to cook elaborate meals. He’s very really into every detail and every little thing. I think I took after that, his passion and commitment to getting really into the fresh ingredients. And definitely also very early on did barbecuing become a huge part of all of our lives. As early as I can remember my father’s obsession with grilling has been a big part of all of our lives and really made an impression on me as far as planning ahead and prepping and brining a day in advance and then doing a barbecue rub and the marinades. Every Thanksgiving the turkeys are still they are done on the barbecue. He’ll be up before the sun is up outside of his apartment building in the cold by himself in the dark with the dog minding the grill. Sometimes we ate really late because certain elements may not have been in our favor and we always had to wait on the conditions of the grill that day. So, barbecuing is big in our family.
I think being a chef must have always been in me. I think that there is some heart and some soul that is in me as a person, and I think a lot of it I can attribute to my parents and my family and my culture. That’s what was imparted to me, what was going to express itself somehow artistically. People always ask me here, “How did you learn to cook food like that?” – because I’m not from Louisiana. I’m from Washington, D.C. and growing up in an African American household and having the soul or whatever that has always existed in me, so I always think it’s a weird question. It’s usually white people who ask me, “How did you learn to cook this way?” I say, “What, you mean the way that the woman who worked in your house taught your grandmother how to cook?” I grew up cooking like this and everything else is I think just somewhat organic and somewhat just in me.
I think that the biggest similarity between my father and I as far as those things are concerned is I think that in a lot of art forms, in cooking and especially in music, there are people who do them for themselves and people who do it for others. I take after my dad, he plays music – he’s not a self-concerned musician. It’s about the reaction from the people, the crowd. He lives for that. He feeds off that. Me too: I am not cooking necessarily everything for myself. I’m cooking for people, to make other people happy and for them to enjoy it, and that makes me happy. I think that’s how my father plays music: it’s not for his own experience and for everyone to sit and watch him and explore the depths of his mind and his soul to put it out there – he put it in the air, sees what happens when you combine this with that, and feed off that reaction. That gives him joy – his learning and his collaborating in other people’s reactions, but I think that’s how I cook.
But you know, my dad and I are very individual and we encouraged and inspired by each other, but I think generally it’s – his culinary tradition is love and joy and passion for what he’s doing and being curious about what everyone else is doing, and why they do it and why they’ve always done it that way.
That’s my dad.
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[1]Telephone interview with Phil Wiggins. March 29, 2017.
[2]Telephone interview with Martha Wiggins. March 2, 2017.