Black food has helped shape Charlotte’s cuisine. It’s essential to share those stories.

They say history is written by the victors. But can they cook? When they sit down to celebrate, whose hands prepare the feast, and which stories, secrets, ways of knowing are passed with the plates, silently refuting what was printed on the page?

2021’s “The Skillet” was the greatest accomplishment of my career. It was not something done on my own, and it didn’t make me a household name. What it did was articulate a shift in American culture through a lens we all relate to: food.

I was tapped to source, write and direct the ambitious multimedia series for CharlotteFive. It included articles, videos and social media posts that featured six of Charlotte’s top chefs talking about African influences in their cooking.

It turns out, we weren’t alone in our desire to tell Black food stories. The series coincided with Netflix’s “High on the Hog,” an award-winning series with much the same premise.

At the same time, food scholarship was exploding on the subject. Magazines like “For the Culture,” dedicated expressly to celebrating Black women in food and wine, the Food Network’s “Delicious Miss Brown,” cookbooks, nutritionists, and even podcasts leaned into the topic.

All around us, Black chefs were staking a long-overdue claim to global influence. From the Brazilian feijoada of chef Whitney Thomas to chef Michael Bowling’s cold fried chicken, our favorite foods across the Americas, our most universal and standard comfort dishes, are rooted in Africa.

And those recipes, methods and creative flourishes carry an intensely personal truth for people of the African diaspora. Although separated by centuries, language and enslavement, the link to our heritage was preserved. Not in something so easily revised or discarded as written history. But something in the belly, in the bone.

Standing in their kitchens, each chef recounted a moment of recognition, of seeing a ripple of the shared past reflected in the plate. For chef Thomas, born and raised in the small North Carolina town of Reidsville, it came when she was preparing to lead the kitchen at a Latin fusion restaurant. As one of the few African American women helming top-ranked fine dining concepts, she is meticulous about immersing herself in the culture, language and history of a dish, mastering it herself before serving it to others.

“I’ve had this before!” Thomas exclaimed. She tasted her grandmother’s pot in the national dish of Brazil.

I had my own moment at The Cooking Pot, where Esther Ikuru’s moi moi awakened dormant memories of my childhood in Nigeria, before we immigrated to the States. The labor-intensive pudding made with black-eyed peas and garnishes such as beef or shrimp tucked inside to surprise and delight the eater was a staple that I hadn’t had since those days.

This consumable history has filled in the blanks that documentation sometimes cannot. Black folks in certain parts of Texas recognize their family’s flavor profile in Senegalese cooking, Puerto Ricans experience a piece of their Africanness almost daily, each time they bite into a snack of plantain. White Americans who have loved this food for centuries, calling it Southern food, are learning too, the real people and their real stories behind the dynamic, vibrant cuisine.

And it hasn’t remained stagnant. Chefs like Gregory Collier, who owns Leah & Louise with his wife, Subrina, has been named a James Beard Award Semifinalist for Best Chef Southeast three times. Last month, he was named a finalist in a new James Beard category — Outstanding Chef.

The Colliers are taking the foundational references and spinning them forward. Their Camp North End restaurant, is both an ode to old-school juke joints and other safe spaces for Black expression, and a chic, cashless cafe with a deep craft bar. Collard greens are not on the menu. But they may make an appearance in a dish pickled, smoked or dehydrated, or atop it as garnish.

“The Skillet” resonated with people more than I could have anticipated. I received hundreds of individual responses and social media shares, and educational institutions reached out with invitations for guest talks. The city’s NPR affiliate, WFAE, had me on twice to discuss the CharlotteFive series — with a minor public uproar over a popular host’s repeated mauling of my name.

Readers from as far as West Africa wrote to express their connection to the series.

There is little more universal than food, and for too long, shame and bias kept some of our most loved dishes from their rightful place on our tables. I believe “The Skillet” and other stories that uncover these connections resonate with so many because they answer a question people hardly know they carry inside. Turns out it was right there all along, just on the tip of our tongues.

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in 2022 and has been updated. Some of the chefs involved in this series have moved on to other roles.