“No one needs another cookbook, right?” Marcus Samuelsson says. It’s a curious thing to hear from a man days away from releasing his newest one. “You have access to recipes and ideas through AI and Google.”
The Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef behind Harlem’s Red Rooster has his answer in “Back to Green,” on sale Tuesday, October 20, a cookbook four years in the making. And Atlanta won’t just be reading it—Samuelsson says dishes from the book will join the menu at Marcus Bar & Grille, his Edgewood Avenue restaurant, after the launch.
The premise is simple. A search engine can tell you the benefits of farro or sea moss, he says. The book is there to show you what to do with them, drawing on “of-the-earth” ingredients like coconut, plantains, teff, and acai, and on the cooks across the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa, and Asia who have relied on them for generations.
Samuelsson knows healthy and delicious usually get treated as opposites, but he’s here to set the record straight. “We can make it healthy, delicious, and we can make it with joy,” he says.
The idea is less about overhauling how you cook than tweaking what you already make. Much of the book took shape during the pandemic, when he was home cooking for his family. His daughter Grace’s breakfast waffles now start with a banana and sweet potato base and a fold of cooked quinoa, cutting the white flour by a third. Spirulina powder goes into pesto. Fish gets steamed instead of fried, topped with thin slices of ginger and garlic, which also happen to help boost your immune system. “It doesn’t have to be these far-away ideas,” he says. “It could be very basic.”
Plenty of those ideas came from cooks who have worked with these ingredients all their lives, and Samuelsson would rather point to them than take the credit. Most Americans know acai, for example, as a sugary smoothie bowl. He wanted to learn how to work it into a vinaigrette or a morning bowl of fruit. “What could be better than speaking to chefs from Brazil?” he says.
That spirit of gathering and sharing knowledge runs through the book, much of it built for potlucks and big family tables. It’s also what keeps the globe-trotting chef tied to Atlanta and his Old Fourth Ward restaurant. “We could have put the restaurant anywhere, but to be in the community and of the community has been really fun,” he says. “Atlanta has always come out to support.”
He’s bullish on the wider food scene, too, from overlooked mom-and-pops and one of his favorite Ethiopian spots to decades-old institutions and fine dining. “I think Atlanta is an incredible food scene that’s actually catching up with its music,” he says.
For all the talk of superfoods, Samuelsson’s measure of success is decidedly simple: a reader who shows up to a signing with a copy of his book full of sticky notes and grease stains.
“[It] means that they used them,” he says. “As a writer, author, nothing makes you happier than that.”
Samuelsson is scheduled to appear at the Central Library Downtown Tuesday, Oct. 27, from 7 to 8 p.m., in conversation with Mike Jordan, hosted by Brave + Kind Bookshop. Books will be pre-signed, and the first 50 people in line get a free copy courtesy of the Fulton County Library.
