[music]

Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I am grateful you are here. On today's show, we'll get ready for Rosh Hashanah with Jake Cohen, the author of I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day.

We'll talk about the Anne Saxelby Fund, which aims to teach young adults about farm life. We'll preview the New York Latino Film Festival, which gets started this week, and speak with performer, mezzo-soprano, and figure skater since childhood, Alicia Hall Moran, how she's combining singing and skating in a new show. That's the plan, so let's get this started with one of the great staple foods in history, rice.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Before you even get to the recipes in JJ Johnson's new cookbook, The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table, there are beautiful illustrations that signal to the reader there's a lot of history attached to rice. First, there's a watercolor of brown hands holding an earth-tone bowl full of grains. There's another illustration of a woman with a baby strapped to her back and a blue cloth as she harvests rice, and then there were some photos.

One in particular shows 28 small piles of rice, 28 different kinds of rice, including Bhutanese red, Poha flattened, black glutinous, and Charleston Gold. That's before the introduction, an introduction where Johnson writes, "Rice is a simple grain with a complex history, a staple that not only nourishes but also connects people to community, cultural tradition, and the land." In a sense, home.

Chef JJ Johnson, who also owns the restaurant, Fieldtrip, grew up in a family where rice was key to a good meal, particularly when it came to his grandma's Puerto Rican food. His new cookbook is called The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table. The book is out today and in studio with me is Chef JJ Johnson. Welcome to the studio.

JJ Johnson: Thank you for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, how is rice typically used in the meals of your culture? What's your favorite rice center dish? We want to get you in on this conversation. Maybe it's rice and peas or jollof rice or fried rice. Call us, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call up, join us on air, or you can text to us at that number as well. You can also reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. Maybe you have a question about cooking rice.

Maybe it gets overcooked in your house or undercooked or maybe you want to know about rice cookers or you just want some advice from Chef Johnson about how to make rice-based meals more interesting. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in or you can text to us at that number and you can reach us on social media as well. As I mentioned, the beginning of the book really sets the stage for what's to come. What made you want to start the book with these really, really evocative images?

JJ Johnson: I think when you look at cookbooks, it's mostly just the pictures, and there's so much story that needs to still be told. Danica, my co-author, is an illustrator, which was amazing when I found this out. I was like, "Well, what do you think about all the unopened things, thoughts that we can't talk about, you can draw?" That's why you see the illustrations of the book.

Because as you were talking about the illustrations, I was getting chills because I was like, "Oh, my goodness, the illustrations are coming to life. They mean something and they're also just so beautiful," like she did an amazing job. As you turn through the book before you get to the beautiful pictures, you're like, "Oh." You're reading this historical story and you're like, "Oh, this is what happened," or "I see it now." I think that's very important when you're thinking about a grain like rice that has so much history.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it was part of the storytelling, I felt.

JJ Johnson: Exactly, yes. It's a part of the story of rice. Rice is just one of those ingredients that me and you could probably not even talk about the book and I'm like, "What's your favorite rice dish?" You're like, "Well, JJ, why is this not rice dish in the book?" That says what is the greatest thing about rice is that it touches all culture. It expresses people. For me, I want everybody to know it's easy to cook.

Alison Stewart: All right. We'll guess the cooking part of it. I want to talk about the grandma part of it. Is it Grandma Bibi?

JJ Johnson: I could never say well as a kid, so I called all my grandmother's Bibi.

Alison Stewart: All right, Grandma Bibi. Sunday dinner was a big thing. That was in Pennsylvania. You split your time between New York and Pennsylvania. What were some of your grandma's go-to rice-centric meals?

JJ Johnson: I grew up with my grandmother making a dish called asopao, which is a soupy Puerto Rican rice dish. You can get asopao de pollo. You can get asopao de camarones. She would make a big pot on the stove. This very aluminum silver pot that she would make and then asopao would last a week. They would reheat it and they would drink it out of a coffee cup.

They would walk around the house and they would just drink it out of a cup. That was like pre-meal like amuse-bouche on Sunday dinner. Then she would do arroz con gandules. She would have concón or pegao, which is a crispy bottom part of the rice in the middle of the table. She would do sancocho. She would do tons of these rice dishes at the table and it was a celebration.

It was like everybody was always looking forward to this grandioso, amazing rice dish. It was like a debate between the week. I can hear my great-great-aunts arguing about it, my mom, my aunt, my dad, my uncle. Everybody was trying to put in their two cents of what it should be at the table, but it connected us all. It kept us all going and it made us feel very comforting at the table even for myself as a little kid.

Alison Stewart: When you became a professional, a food professional, how did those images and those feelings and those moments of being around your family and rice translate into your profession for you?

JJ Johnson: Early on in my profession, I didn't really cook any food for my family. I was cooking very Eurocentric food. Probably, the only rice dish I was cooking was risotto, which I talked about in the book. Not until I traveled to Ghana, that's when I found myself through food. Then I started to fall back in love with rice because I started to hate rice early on in my professional life because it wasn't something that was at the table.

It wasn't something that you would see in a fine-dining restaurant, so why should I know how to make my grandma's pot of rice? I was starting to look down on my own culture. Then when I went to Ghana, I was like, "Hold on. This food is delicious and it's reminding me of somewhere. Oh, it's my Bibi Iris' kitchen." Then that's when I started to explore a lot of rice and cooking the food of myself.

Alison Stewart: When you began to research the history of rice, what do you think is important for people to know about the early history of rice and how it became, pardon the pun, ingrained in different civilizations?

JJ Johnson: I think the most important part is that there's two, I call the two yellow brick roads of rice. There was only one yellow brick road at a time and that rice was cultivated and grown in West Africa. West Africa was shipping rice all around the world. Then for some reason, it got blacklisted. They then sold the seeds to the Chinese and then they started to grow rice.

Then they realized they didn't need their seeds anymore from West Africa. That's why you see two grains of rice. You see glaberrima, which is a West African grain, and then you see glaberrima Oryza. The sad part about is that when we think about rice, the first place that comes to mind is Asia. Really, your mind should be going to West Africa. It should be going to the Caribbean. It should be going to South America.

Those are places that also celebrate rice are also ingrained in the grain and have very deep history. We really touched on that in The Simple Art of Rice. We talked about the history of the grain. We talked about how the grain has morphed. You see it become Carolina Gold rice in the American South or Red Hill rice in Trinidad. We start to talk about where you start to see the shifts of the grain.

Alison Stewart: My guest is JJ Johnson. The name of the cookbook is The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table. We've got some calls already. Let's talk to Jonna calling in from Westchester. Hi, Jonna.

Jonna: Hi.

Alison Stewart: You're on the air.

Jonna: Yes, I just wanted to say that the subject of rice is one that's very near and dear to many Indian and Indian-American hearts. I am Indian but never really loved rice. That's something that right away is unusual. I always was more into all the Indian breads, but there's one particular South Indian dish that I do love, and you won't find it in many restaurants. It's called Puliyogare. It's a tamarind peanut rice. It's absolutely delicious. It's usually quite spicy.

It's something that also you can find in temples because the priests will make it, and then it's considered actually almost holy rice. It's very special and because the priests have made it. The other thing that I just wanted to mention is that South Indians don't tend to use the basmati rice, which is very separate. I love it. It's lovely and it's kind of light, but South Indian people use long-grain rice, which has more starch in it and is more sticky.

Alison Stewart: Jonna, thank you for calling. It's interesting just hearing Jonna talk about it and talk about what it meant for her family, but also then getting into the history and getting into understanding that individual cultures handle race in individual ways, and it means different things in different cultures. Before we leave the West African discussion, I do have to ask about the jollof rice.

JJ Johnson: Oh boy.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: This can be a friendly debate. We'll say it's friendly about where it originated. When you think about jollof rice, tell us your position or how you think about it and how it originated.

JJ Johnson: I'm going to take a deep breath. The type of jollof rice that I cook every day in my restaurant, Fieldtrip, in New York City is Ghanaian jollof. That's because I cooked in Ghana and that was the jollof I was taught to cook. My Nigerian friends tell me it's good, but I try to stay out of the Nigerian-Ghanaian jollof wars. That's why in The Simple Art of Rice, I wanted to highlight another culture around jollof, which is the Liberian jollof rice, which reminded me when I started to learn about it over the last two years of research. It started to remind me of jambalaya and the rice a little bit more stickier together.

You have chicken. You have seafood. You have beef. You have all these things in it. If I'm a person that likes to celebrate or set the table or trying to change at my Christmas or Thanksgiving or any holiday, I can put this beautiful, big pot of the Liberian jollof in the middle of the table. The real reason is when we think of West Africa, we are thinking of jollof the same way when we think of India. We're thinking about biryani now, right? There are so many different ways of biryani. I think jollof rice is the key to exploring West Africa more. Hopefully, people will turn the key to using Liberian jollof to explore another part of Africa.

Alison Stewart: What's unique about Liberian jollof?

JJ Johnson: It has chunks of beef. It has chicken wings. It has shrimp. Typically, jollof you eat, you just make your jollof in the pot and then you have your meat and everything on the side. This is all cooked together in the stage the way that I've envisioned it, the way that I've seen it. That's what makes it different and how I want people to celebrate it.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to JJ Johnson, chef and cookbook author of The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table. It is out today. We're also taking your calls. How do you cook rice? What does rice mean in your culture? What's your favorite rice dish? How often do you eat rice? Are you a stovetop person? Are you a rice-cooker person? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on the air or you can send us a text to that number or you can reach out on social media. We are talking about all things rice. What are grandma grains?

JJ Johnson: Ooh, the grandma grains of the world?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

JJ Johnson: Those are the original origin grains. Carolina Gold rice, Middlin, Italian Pilgrim rice, Black Tribune, Emperor's rice. Jefferson red well really red rice, aka, Jefferson red rice. Those are the grandma grains. When we are buying rice in the store, we're just like, "Oh, we're getting long-grain. We're getting short-grain. We're getting instant rice." Nobody knows what that rice actually is.

I think when I want people to think about rice if you're a coffee-drinker, I want you to think about like when you're like, "I want to eat the Ethiopian on the left side of the mountain or the right side of the mountain coffee," right? That's the same thing of the grandma grains of the world. Carolina Gold rice is the grandma grain of America. That is America's rice, Carolina Gold. Not Carolina rice, Carolina Gold rice, right? That is the grain of America.

Basmati rice is the mother grain of India. Italian Pilgrims rice is the mother grain of Italy. Though that's what the mother grains are and we really dive deep into that, we break it down and talk about heirloom grains the same way. If you really are a rice connoisseur or you want to up your pantry, you can go get some beautiful grandma grains right in your backyard.

Especially if you live in New Jersey, there's a great farm in New Jersey called Blue Moon Farm that's great that people were like, "Oh, my God, JJ, it's 5 miles from my house. I never knew that even existed," or right in Upstate New York and Hudson Valley, there's a West African rice farmer. Anywhere, there's irrigation. Somebody's growing rice. You just don't realize it and that rice should be on your table. Even if you don't get The Simple Art of Rice, that rice should just be on your table anyway.

Alison Stewart: Two things. One, Up Your Pantry needs to be the name of your next cookbook, and what is the best climate to grow rice?

JJ Johnson: I don't think there is. I think people have figured out how to grow rice in many different ways. Remember, you can grow rice in rivers, lakes, anywhere where water flows. I think the best way for me to describe it is if you know a crawfish farmer, they grow rice. If you know a person that lived in Martha's Vineyard for a really long time, they were growing rice. The Dutch in Hudson Valley, they were growing rice. Anywhere where water's flowing, people have figured out how to grow rice. The perfect irrigation, there's a debate on that. I think what we're all learning is, and not for me to start geeking out with you-

Alison Stewart: It's okay.

JJ Johnson: -is that we're all learning that the way the most rice is produced in America right now is giving off the same carbon-neutral that cows are giving off. When I talk about the grandma grains of the world, we're going to start seeing more grandma grains because that's the way we should be producing rice and it should have never stopped.

Alison Stewart: Going back to the original way.

JJ Johnson: To the original way of milling and growing rice. It should've never stopped. That's a whole other conversation that we can get into on the reason why that stopped.

Alison Stewart: Tell me real quick.

JJ Johnson: Well, agriculture is the foundation of America. Enslaved people were the ones growing rice. When enslaved people were free, they just wanted the land. Nobody wanted to give them the land and they stopped growing rice. Rice was a cash crop. It stopped being a cash crop. It was a cash crop like gold and cotton. That's when the art of rice was lost. You go back in history. That's when parboiled rice came into effect. That's when the government was injecting rice like beef five into rice to make it gold because nobody knew what it looked like.

That's why in certain labels, you just see Carolina because it was a marketing tool. There's a lot into the whole reason of why rice is the perception the way it is right now. With the book, The Simple Art of Rice, it will change that for you. It'll change your kitchen table because you'll be realizing, "This is my Swiss army knife. I can cook many dishes," or you'll start to learn the history of saying, "Oh, wow, I didn't know this." That's the greatest thing about rice. The individual grain of rice will teach you history about folks and places just here in our country or around the world.

Alison Stewart: Our lines are filling up. We'll take some of your calls about rice. Yes, we'll get into recipes and how to cook it, but we're also going to get into some more history with JJ Johnson, author of The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World from the Heart of Your Table. We'll have more after the break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is JJ Johnson. His new cookbook is The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table. By the way, JJ will be signing books right after this conversation at McNally Jackson Books in Rockefeller Center, that location. I believe that event is starting at 1:00. We'll get you out there on time. Let's take a couple of calls. Matthew is calling from Montclair, New Jersey. Hi, Matthew.

Matthew: Hi. How are you doing? First, I would say hi. Nice to hear you're back, Alison, and doing well. First, that's that. Second, I just wanted to call this conversation about rice. My father immediately sprung to mind is that he was from Iran from Tehran. Growing up in our house, he refused to really eat pasta ever. I never saw him eat pasta once. Everything was rice. It had to be basmati rice. My mother, who was a really splendid home cook, would make chicken cacciatore or Bolognese or beef bourguignon. It was never pasta. It was always over basmati rice. No egg noodles, no pasta. Basmati rice and chicken cacciatore is a pretty solid memory for me growing up.

Alison Stewart: I loved how you described your mother's cooking as splendid as well. [chuckles] Let's talk to Anne from Brooklyn, who wants to go down the road of history a little bit. Hi, Anne. Thank you for calling in.

Anne: Thank you. It's boring, but I'll tell you that I'm 75 years old, so I remember things a little longer. My mom explained to me that the enslaved African women would carry seeds in their hair as they traveled. They commonly would go from place to place. They had the watermelon seeds and they had the rice grain seeds. It wasn't like it was traded off a ship or something like that. In South Carolina is where they started to cultivate rice, the Geechee and the Gullah.

For a very long time when we were young, we ate some rice and people would say, "Oh, your family must be from South Carolina or Louisiana," because those were the only states where people ate rice. The people who cultivated America, the British, the French, the Irish, and the Germans were all potato cultures, potato soup, potato salad. They did not eat rice. Those seeds and the growing of seeds, that was because of enslaved people. The women brought the seeds in their hair and they taught America how to grow and cultivate rice. I just wanted to say that. I love your show and I've been to the gentleman's restaurant and his rice dishes are fabulous. Thank you.

JJ Johnson: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] That was a full plate from Anne. We got some history. We got a restaurant review. You were nodding your head in agreement about the women.

JJ Johnson: Oh, yes. I think the biggest thing when we were writing this book was talking about the women braiding their hair with rice seeds. People were like, "Well, JJ, are you sure you want to write about that? There's nothing in the history books." I'm like, "Well, Black cultures, hymns and whispers," right?

Alison Stewart: We're all tradition.

JJ Johnson: You just heard it, right? That's in the book. We talk about it. I think that's the greatest thing when you look about the culture and with the rice. Where the people went, the rice followed. We know they didn't go there because they wanted to, but the rice grains came with them. A fun fact is red rice was banned from the table in America because they knew that it pointed back to West Africa. Thomas Jefferson put Jefferson in front of the name and called it Jefferson red rice and then it was allowed on the table. He saw it as a cash crop and he was figuring out. In American history, rice is a part of a lot of it. It just makes me excited that it's exciting people, exciting your listeners when they're calling in.

Alison Stewart: All right. Before we get into a couple of recipes and a couple of tips, we've been getting a lot of questions about arsenic in rice. You said this is a conversation that's come up. Some of it is misinformation.

JJ Johnson: Yes, arsenic is coming up around rice really heavily. Listen, arsenic is in the soil. It doesn't matter if you eat a carrot. You can potentially have arsenic on it, right? It's a real reason why I tell people, "Wash your rice. Wash your vegetables." There's arsenic in the soil. It just depends on how much arsenic is there. Yes, it's something we should pay attention to. It's something we should challenge.

It's something that we should push the rice industry forward. If you're getting that many people dialing in or calling or want to talk about it, it means that we need to change our rice consumption. We need to go to those grandma grains. We need to go to the farmers' market. We need to look at getting shipped potentially Anson Mills rice to your house because those people are taking care of the rice.

It's the same way if you read labels in the grocery store. Push the rice industry forward to get better rice for all because, yes, there's arsenic all around. We touch on it in The Simple Art of Rice. It's something that made me worry opening a rice restaurant like, "Oh, my goodness. Am I feeding people arsenic?" I'm buying from sustainable rice farmers and doing my homework as well.

Alison Stewart: All right, here's a couple. We have to give people a little something to try. You talk about the finger trick in terms of getting the right amount of water. Could you explain the finger trick?

JJ Johnson: All right, so for everybody out there that doesn't cook a good pot of rice, remember that rice doubles in size. You need to have a pot where it can expand. I don't want anybody to follow a 2:1 ratio anymore with rice. I want you to put the two cups of rice in the pot. Flatten it out. Put your third finger on top of the rice. Pour the liquid to the first knuckle.

Alison Stewart: Not all the way at the bottom of the pot, on top of the rice, the flattened rice. Okay.

JJ Johnson: On top of the rice, right. Pour it all the way to the top knuckle, to your first knuckle, and then put it on the stove at medium heat. Put a top on it and cook it for about 25 minutes and you'll get perfect rice. Don't put salt in the pot. Wait for the rice to be done. Then add your salt, fluff, fluff, fluff. Put the top back on. Let it rest. What the resting does is it carries that grain over to explode.

For everybody out there that hates cooking rice because they don't want to scrub the grains off the bottom, all those grains that stick to the bottom will then come off naturally. A good pot of rice has rice that sticks to the bottom and is crispy. If you're not having rice stick to the bottom of your pot and crispy, that means you were stirring the rice, shaking the pot, and those are big nos.

Alison Stewart: Leave the rice alone?

JJ Johnson: Leave it alone. Let it cook. Go cook something else while that rice is cooking.

Alison Stewart: Step back from the rice, everybody. You mentioned you putting the salt on after and I thought like, "Well, let me go see what are the kind of spices that JJ uses in his cooking." I thought this was really interesting, cinnamon-spiced lamb rice.

JJ Johnson: Ooh, so good.

Alison Stewart: There's cinnamon there. There's nutmeg. There's cumin. There's pistachios as well. What is the cinnamon and nutmeg profile? How is it married with rice? Why is rice a good delivery system?

JJ Johnson: First, cinnamon is one of my most favorite ingredients to use in savory cooking. I love making cinnamon chicken, one of my favorite things. The great thing about rice, it's a foundational ingredient. Whatever flavor bomb you give it, it will absorb it, right? If you're like, "Oh, my God, rice is so boring." JJ is like, "Well, are you bored? You got to give it some flavor." When you add the cinnamon sticks, you add the nutmeg.

You have the lamb fat in there. The rice is absorbing all that. Then you finish it with the pistachios and the dates. It is one of those dishes that you reveal at your table, or when you go to taste it before everybody else tastes it, you're not going to want to give it to anybody. You're going to be like, "I spend all the time and the effort. This smells really good and it also tastes so good."

Then the grain of rice is going to be like pearls and have a little bite to it. All that nutmeg, cinnamon, lamb fat will be absorbed in each individual grain that you'll be really proud of yourself. You could do that with any-- you can put cumin, cayenne, turmeric, curry. You can put fennel seeds. You can put fresh herbs. That's what's so great about rice. It just absorbs the natural flavor. I cook black rice with a little bit of apple juice, a little bit of orange juice.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

JJ Johnson: Once you get comfortable cooking rice, then you realize you could just do whatever you want.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "My sister loves a particular type of rice, long black grains which flowers 'once cooked.' Any clue what that type of rice is and its name?"

JJ Johnson: Long black grain?

Alison Stewart: She describes it as long black grains.

JJ Johnson: Hold on. Let me go to the book.

Alison Stewart: Let's see.

JJ Johnson: I think that's--

Alison Stewart: If you had to guess.

JJ Johnson: I never pronounce this one right. It's the Terry purple. I hope I'm saying that right.

Alison Stewart: Terry purple. You think so?

JJ Johnson: Terry purple in the left corner. It's a little bit of long-grain.

Alison Stewart: Could be.

JJ Johnson: It also could be wild rice as well. That's the other thing is that most people who want to consider wild rice, not rice, you're wrong. Wild rice is rice. Remember, rice is grass. I've been told my whole life wild rice is its own thing. Wild rice is grass. I would never take that away from the native people of here. They were growing wild rice before we came here. Then we learned that they were growing that rice and then the enslaved people were growing, then we're able to grow Carolina Gold rice. Wild rice is there, but it's either wild rice or it's some type of forbidden black rice.

Alison Stewart: Someone just texted us, "Oh, my God, the caller about the history of rice and subsequent conversation is life-changing from a white American who had no idea. What an amazing piece of history that deserves a spotlight. Can't live without my rice." You have a book signing to get to in Rockefeller Center at McNally Jackson at 1:00 PM. The name of the book is The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table from Chef JJ Johnson of the restaurant, Fieldtrip, in Harlem, which you're expanding. Are you expanding?

JJ Johnson: Yes, I got one in Rockefeller Center, the lower level. One in front of Columbia University. We just opened up two weeks ago. Please come by. Everything's under $15. We have Carolina Gold rice, Texas brown rice, Tribune black rice. We have cilantro herbs sticky rice. I hope that at one point, Fieldtrip will highlight around six or seven rice farmers from around the country or the world, highlighting their rice grains in particular parts of country that are freshly milled to deliver directly to us.

Alison Stewart: Have a great book signing.

JJ Johnson: Thank you very much.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.