Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen

"Alexander Smalls has owned, conceptualized, and helmed some of New York's most iconic African American restaurants. Now, he follows up the James Beard award-winning Between Harlem and Heaven with Meals, Music, and Muses, a look at his world glimpsed through the lenses of music, food, culture, and history. It is a must-read journey through a life well lived and in recipe and reminiscence details the musical forms learned, the friends and family who instructed, and the foods shared along the way." - Jessica B. Harris

"If wine is bottled poetry, and jazz is brown sugar sprinkled in your ear, then Meals, Music, and Muses is a smorgasbord of fine words and sounds, a delicious symphony of haute cuisine that'll make you wanna kiss your momma, then thank the ancestors for making a way out of no way--for Hoppin' John Cakes and Grits and Sage Sausage Gravy and Frogmore Stew and all the recipes Alexander Smalls has reimagined so elegantly." - Kwame Alexander

"I had the great honor of being a guest at one of Alexander's famous Sunday brunches in his beautiful brownstone in Harlem. The food was unbelievably delicious! It was a magical afternoon that I will never forget." - Tina Knowles-Lawson

"In Meals, Music, and Muses, Alexander creates a lyrical culinary anthology of our lives. A symphonic composition full of stories, contemporary southern recipes that celebrates the food and musical genres that influenced the history of America... He sets the table in a unique way from jazz to blues to divas on a plate...This is not your mother's cookbook..." - Dee Dee Bridgewater