During his junior year as an art student at SUNY Purchase, Kemar Wynter was supposed to pick an area of focus. At first, he couldn’t think of anything. Then, it clicked: He’d focus on home. As one of four Black students in a cohort of 22, several hours from his home in Flatlands, Brooklyn, he yearned for that welcoming feeling of being in the kitchen, surrounded by family, with the smell of comfort foods and traditional Jamaican dishes filling the room.

As a kid, Wynter would rush home from school for Friday night dinners and head straight for the kitchen, where his aunt would put him to work peeling carrots, stirring pots, and marinating meats. What began as a childhood obligation morphed into a lifelong passion. He was drawn to the experimental process of cooking, which required a balance of careful attention and self-trust. From age eight he fixated on macaroni pie, a family staple he then spent 18 years perfecting, tweaking the recipe until it was just right. In Wynter’s family, written recipes didn’t exist. He learned by watching his aunt and mother cook, absorbing the basics and then moving on to more advanced techniques. Read More