Food can deliver a powerful message, as chef’s new book elaborately details

As he throws flour across the counter in a sudden sideways dust storm, Marcus Samuelsson talks about his new cookbook, about the Harlem restaurant it chronicles and about the wider project that they both articulate. As he works the butter into the biscuit dough and stirs the contents of a saute pan — a mash-up of chicken skin and dried shrimp, lemongrass and oyster sauce and ginger — he keeps talking.

“Food is coding. It’s class; it’s tribal,” says Samuelsson as he works the stoves of the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen. The chef was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Sweden with his adoptive family and now lives and works in New York City. “Art, music, fashion, food: All of it is coding, and food is the least clear.” Listening to him, you feel that he’s trying to work his mission statement along with the shards of butter into the biscuits themselves, as if the conversation and the food have become parts of the same thing.

Which, in his latest cookbook, “The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem,” they have. What Samuelsson wants to do is more than open a restaurant, cook some food, write a cookbook: He wants to celebrate a neighborhood. And by doing so, “to hope,” as Hilton Als writes in his foreword to the book, “and to effect change.” Samuelsson wants to cook for you, but his ambitions extend considerably beyond the plate — or maybe it’s that what’s on that plate is a lot more than food.

Samuelsson rose to culinary fame at the New York restaurant Aquavit in his early 20s, he appears on food television, he cooked for President Obama, he’s written cookbooks and a memoir, and he made a remarkable journey from Ethiopia to Sweden and now to Harlem, where he’s lived for almost a dozen years. Harlem is the locus for Red Rooster, the restaurant Samuelsson opened there in fall 2010, and for the book he’s written about the restaurant, its neighborhood and people. And it’s what he’s talking about now, as he’s cooking.

“I waited six years before I wrote the book for a reason,” Samuelsson says, stirring the pan in which he’s making bird funk, a hugely fragrant and deeply addictive sauce that will go onto the brown butter biscuits that are now in the oven. The restaurant had to come first, he says, then the food and the stories.

“Food is a gateway,” the chef says, now sauteing chicken livers in another pan. “We know fried chicken and gumbo and shrimp and grits, but whose food is it, who does it belong to? It’s our food. It’s American food.” Samuelsson is making something he calls chicken liver butter, an insanely rich and velvety thing — imagine foie gras buttercream; its ingredients are allspice, bourbon, brandy, chicken livers, whole cloves, maple syrup, thyme and butter. They will all go into a Cuisinart.

“Think about chicken liver, about the coding between the foie gras that comes from Europe and the chicken liver that’s more rooted in Southern or poverty cooking. People love foie gras but might not like chicken liver: It’s a class thing. But it’s delicious. We can celebrate it.” Samuelsson dips a biscuit into the bowl of the Cuisinart and beckons those around him to eat. The sauteed bird funk goes on top. He hasn’t stopped talking.

“We have the luxury to make this with butter,” he says, scooping another biscuit. “It explains the journey of both luxury and poverty.” That journey is Samuelsson’s own, of course, from Ethiopian refugee to Swedish culinary student to one of the most lauded chefs in America. It’s also traced in his cooking: through the classical French technique, and through the flavors of Africa and of Scandinavia that are woven around recipes for shoebox ham and Obama’s short ribs and fried yardbird, the restaurant’s signature dish.

This story was originally published January 10, 2017 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Food can deliver a powerful message, as chef’s new book elaborately details."