Salt & Spine

"I just thought about so many Black women who came before me who have been cooking amazing food in this country for centuries and how we don't know their names. But the stories of the women I do know in my family—my great-great aunt, my two grandmothers, my mother—I could tell the stories that I do know about them. So that was just crucial for me and, you know, it was very emotional as I was writing it."This week, we're excited to welcome Vallery Lomas to Salt + Spine, the podcast on stories behind cookbooks.Vallery grew up in Southern Louisiana, learning to cook from her mother and grandmothers—her signature dish as a child was her Grandmother Leona’s Strawberry Delight—but she didn’t always plan to be a baker. Vallery went to USC to study pre-med, and it was only because of a requirement to study foreign languages that she stumbled into learning French and eventually abandoned the pre-med track for French and Psychology. Vallery graduated into the recession of 2008 and fi