Vertamae Grosvenor

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (April 4, 1937 – September 3, 2016) was an American culinary anthropologist, griot, food writer, and broadcaster on public media.

She was known for her cookbook-memoir, Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). She also appeared in several films, including Daughters of the Dust (1992), about a Gullah family in 1902 during a time of transition on the Sea Islands, and Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison's 1987 novel of the same name.

Vertamae Smart was born in 1937 and raised in Hampton County, South Carolina, in the Low Country. She grew up speaking Gullah, as her parents' families had been in the area for centuries and were part of the culture. She grew up on Low Country cuisine, and recounted her grandmother Estella Smart's way with oysters in her first cookbook, published in 1970. She became interested in food and cooking as expressions of culture.

When she was about eight, her family moved from the Gullah Geechee Corridor to Philadelphia, where she spent her teenage years and where, as a latchkey kid and an only child, she "had lots of time to experiment with cooking." "I would use up all the food experimenting and she would never fuss," writes Grosvenor in Vibration Cooking. "I now realize how uptight it must have put her cause we were so poor and every bit of food counted."

In 1958, at the age of 19, Smart took off for Paris, France, looking to pursue theater in the bohemian circles of Europe. She also traveled to cities in Italy and other European countries. In Paris, she recognized that a Senegalese woman selling food on the street was using techniques she knew from home, and she began to write about food and cooking as a way of expressing one's culture.

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