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NMH Magazine : Spring 2004

Everybody Comes to Norma Jean’s

by Adam Orth 

It’s six o’clock on a Sunday evening. So, naturally, Norma Jean Darden ’57 is working. With her are three people, all shoehorned into the tiny office of her New York City business, Spoonbread Catering. Darden is at her laptop looking up new recipes while discussing contract language with her companions. A new and prestigious New York City restaurant needs food service, and Darden hopes to seal the deal.

From this epicenter and a nearby bustling kitchen, Darden runs a catering business that has fed the famous and the infamous, including presidents and red-hot celebrities. Amid the notes, lists, and calendars covering the office walls is a slip of paper with Martha Stewart’s work numbers.

The two phones in Darden’s office are an insistent presence. Each has four lines that keep Darden in touch with the latest crisis. On this night, there are two crises, one at each of her New York City restaurants. Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too, in nearby Harlem, is where the fire trucks are. The deli two doors down is on fire. 

Darden makes no move to rush to the scene. “You can’t get there—the fire trucks are in the way,” she calmly explains.

Her second restaurant, Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, is in Morningside Heights, next door to Darden’s office. A cook is missing and panicked employees are phoning in regular updates. While people try to find the missing cook, and others keep an eye on the fire, Darden stays on track. She needs to get a contract signed.“

I’m here seven days a week,” she says. “There’s always something going on.”

Darden’s life and food are intertwined. The roots of this relationship go deep into her family’s southern heritage, blossoming in a book she cowrote with her sister, Carole, called Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family.

Now in its 25th year in print, the book led to her catering business, which O, The Oprah Magazine called “the secret weapon of some of NY’s savviest party-givers.” It’s also brought her television appearances, including one with Martha Stewart, and the starring role in an off-Broadway production titled after her book. 

Darden opened the 50-seat Miss Mamie’s, named after her mother, six years ago. She opened Miss Maude’s, which is named for a favorite aunt, three years ago. The latter is located in Harlem and seats 75 people.

The service at both restaurants is relaxed, attentive, and friendly. 
The coffee is poured strong and rich, and portions are enormous. From cornbread to fried chicken smothered in gravy to sweet potato 
pie, this is not food for the guilt-ridden.

Reportedly, former president Bill Clinton, whose office is in nearby Harlem, is particularly fond of the Miss Mamie Sampler with shrimp, short ribs, and chicken.

“I have some vegetarians who eat ribs if I don’t tell anyone,” says Darden. “They break down.”

Food has dominated Darden’s life for more than two decades. But, to this day, this fact surprises her. “Food chose me,” Darden says. “If you’d told me I’d be in the food business, I’d have been flabbergasted.”

By the time Darden entered Northfield as a sophomore, she’d mastered the art of potato-stick casseroles. That was about it. 

She arrived at NMH eager for independence; what she encountered instead was a rigid academic schedule that left her with few freedoms. Darden’s dominant memory of NMH is strictness. “Every minute was accounted for,” she recalls. “I couldn’t wait to get out.”

Then there were the jobs. As is still true today, every student had to contribute to the running of the school. Darden’s first job was washing pots and pans. Her second was cleaning toilets.

“My father was shocked,” she says. “Here I was going to this fancy New England boarding school, and I’m cleaning toilets.”

Darden grew to accept the work, knowing all students had to do it. In many ways, everyone was treated equally at NMH. In one way, however, they weren’t.

The incident started out simply enough: a white classmate and Darden wanted to be roommates. Among students of the same races, this was a routine matter at the school. But for a white and a black student, it became more complicated. “You couldn’t live together—that was really clear,” Darden says. She and her friend asked anyway. They needed approval from both parents, they were told. Darden’s parents said yes. The white girl’s parents said no, mortifying her.

Darden was struck by how out of sync the incident was with the school’s culture. “I thought it was very unusual at a Christian school,” said Darden. “It was a religious place, and it was open, but there was a little form of racism right there.” 

Two years ago, a group of African American NMH students invited her to campus to mark Black History Month. Impressed by the activism and intelligence of the students she met, Darden noted how much the school had changed.

After attending NMH, Darden graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Then she headed to New York, did odd jobs to pay the bills, and started looking for acting jobs. She performed on Broadway and off-Broadway, but in the end she couldn’t get her acting career off the ground. “I kept getting cut. For some parts I was too tall, or too light, or too dark. I was always too something.”
 

Her height, slender build, and 200-watt smile led her to another venue: a career with the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency. She walked the runways in Paris, London, and Milan. At the time, black models weren’t in high demand, and Darden was one of only a few to achieve success. She appeared in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Ebony. Her modeling career lasted through the ’60s and into the ’70s. It ended, in part, because of a conversation with a woman from Vogue. Darden told the woman her grandfather was born a slave. One thing led to another, and the woman remarked that Darden must have great recipes for a cookbook.

“I’d never seen my heritage that way, so I let it slide,” said Darden. “The next day, she called and said she had an editor.”

Darden and her sister started taking this book idea seriously.

Later, a reporter for the New York Times called wanting to do a story on the model who was writing a cookbook. Darden gave a glowing account of the book’s progress. “I needed the publicity for modeling,” she says. “I had, like, one chapter. So, then I was writing in between fashion shows.”

Six years passed before Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine became a reality. At first the sisters tried to collect family recipes through the mail. Nobody wrote back. There were no recipes to share. Their relatives cooked by feel, by taste, by texture, by memory. 

“We had to go south and cook with them,” Darden says.
The sisters traveled to Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. Through trial and error, they learned how to cook. Some of their errors include a roast suckling pig that caught on fire and cooked in four hours instead of ten. It turned out delicious anyway. The sisters also collected family history, which they found just as interesting as the food.

Thus Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is more than a cookbook. It’s also a record of the sisters’ humorous, romantic, tragic, and inspiring heritage. Each chapter tells a story. There’s the grandfather who was born a slave yet became a successful businessman. Another grandfather was beaten by the family he worked for—a family he was perhaps related to. Racism is why Darden’s father took his young family and his medical practice north to New Jersey. His family urged him to leave when a white doctor, a leader in the local Ku Klux Klan, objected to his presence.

Advancement through hard work and education is a theme that runs throughout the book. But the sisters also deal lovingly with relatives who fell short of their promise. They even unearthed scandals, some of which didn’t make it into the book. Those who collect family lore, warns Darden, should brace themselves for surprises. “Anything can pop up,” she says.

After Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine was published in 1978, the phone started ringing. People wanted meals catered. In 1983 Darden started Spoonbread Catering, and what began as a lark became a full-time profession. She’s kept acting as a sideline, too; her gigs have included playing a choreographer in the movie The Cotton Club.

Her sister has since moved on from the food business. As for Darden, her attitude has changed from the days she picked at the meals her family set before her.

How is her appetite these days? “Voracious,” she says, flashing that 200-watt smile. “Voracious.”