The vivacious chef Carla Hall hit our radar as a contestant on “Top Chef” and later as a co-host of “The Chew” but she lived many lives before television, including accountant, model and owner of a catering business – where she was always on edge about paying her bills.
“I would scrape together all this money to do the event and they wouldn’t pay for 30 or 60 days,” she told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man.”
“Oh, well, I couldn’t afford to wait for 30 days, dude. I was [borrowing] from Peter to pay Paul. I would tell them, like, ‘When are you going to pay me?’ I remember standing in the shower crying because I needed the money to pay my bills. Like, am I going to lose my car?”
Even after she landed on “The Chew” her money worries lingered.
“I remember going to upfronts, which had just started, and now I’m on a national network. I’m on ABC. I’m on ‘The Chew,’ … I had barely enough money to actually eat.”
Now, of course, the Nashville, Tennessee, native is grateful for the high-flying career she’s forged. She’s working with QVC on a food and kitchenware line called Sweet Heritage by Carla Hall. It’s a perfect name for Carla, a person who is always emphasizing heritage.
“I was born in 1964, and soul food or the foods that I was eating at my grandmother’s house [were a huge influence]. We went there every Sunday after church. My mother didn’t cook … I think the food and the time spent at both grandmothers’ houses just truly influenced me in terms of my palate,” she said referring to savory foods like fried chicken, pickles and sweets like pound cake and caramel cake.
“And so those are the foods that sort of are ingrained in me, and it’s part of my heritage growing up. And I didn’t appreciate them until much later in terms of a chef and wanting to incorporate those into what I do. I went to a French culinary school and so I had run away from it.”
Carla has more than reconnected with her soul food roots, including a 2018 soul food cookbook and an impressive position as the culinary ambassador for the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC.
“And when I went there, I realized, oh my gosh, I have so much to be so proud of, of our history and so
many things that I didn’t know. And I said, ‘This is the thing that has to be shared.’ So I wanted to share our food,” she said. “And soul food we tend to be stuck in all of these celebration dishes: macaroni and cheese, smothered pork chops, oxtails, Right? And so I’ve spoken to black people and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can’t eat soul food because it’s going to kill me.’”
But Carla, who has traced her African ancestry to the Yoruba people in Nigeria and Bubi people from Bioko island (Equatorial Guinea), wants to educate people on soul food — and let them know it’s a much broader category than fried, calorie-laden foods we think of today.
“So if I use my imagination and said, ‘OK, if those ancestors came over today, how would they be
cooking?’ And so they wouldn’t be frying everything. They wouldn’t be doing macaroni and cheese. And a lot of our food is from the culmination of different cultures, right?” she said adding that it’s from Europeans, Native Americans and Africans.
“But it would be those black-eyed peas. It would be those grains. It would be fufu or now corn because of the Native Americans … And all of these other grains, like millet and sorghum,” she said. “And so I said, ‘OK, if we know the celebration dishes, it is also my job to balance it with the everyday dishes, because that’s also soul food.’”
Yes, Carla has a scholarly approach to food. But the chef, whose catchphrase “cooking with love,” says she actually feels that sentiment in her bones.
“I feel like I’m a food whisperer. When I taste your food, I can tell I can taste your heart. Sometimes I taste people’s food and I go to these restaurants and they’re fine dining and everything and I’m like ‘that was OK’ … I may be wowed intellectually, but I’m not moved emotionally,” she said, adding, “The meals that I remember are those that have some kind of connection to those people who were cooking.”