Hands vigorously mixing the ingredients in the bowl, Rafia Zafar followed the recipe made by a former slave. In front of her stood a film crew. With their cameras focused on her, they tried to capture her in the moment.

Months later, she heard that the feature had been nominated for a Mid-America Emmy award.

In addition to serving as the Faculty Director for the Mellon Mays program, Zafar teaches English, African & African American Studies and American Culture Studies at Washington University. Her work focuses on African American food and the culture behind it.

Zafar grew up in Manhattan, N.Y. where her interest in food started to develop when she was a child. Her mom, Zafar describes, was “a cook without an imagination,…she was only interested in getting food on the table.” Instead, Zafar and her sister had “to learn to cook in self-defense,” making dinner for themselves.

After graduating from City College of New York, Zafar spent some time in the world of book publishing. As a side hustle, she worked at Dean & DeLuca, then a cheese store. Talking over Zoom from her office, she said, “We had jam, we had cheese, olive oil, you know…The store probably wasn’t much bigger than my office here.” She laughed as she recalled having to carry 45-pound blocks of cheese up from the basement, but remarked that the job helped to shape her love for the culinary world.

By the time she reached graduate school at Harvard, she expressed interest in doing research about food. But her teachers pushed back.

“The men, who were my teachers back then—I had no female teachers at Harvard—they discouraged me,” she remembered.

They told her that no one would hire her. Yet, since the 1990s, Zafar has been teaching classes on food, starting at the University of Michigan. Because of her New York City roots (her grandparents lived in Harlem), her early research focused on African American literature preceding the Harlem Renaissance. But she has always contemplated writing a book on African Americans and food.

After years of having the idea in the back of her mind, she finally sat down to write “Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning.” Published in 2019, the book reflects the interests from her entire life. It focuses on African American culture pertaining to food and the availability of their recipes. She examines the stories behind recipes and the history behind how they are written. Imagine not having a temperature reading for your oven and having to inherently know the correct temperature to cook with. The stories in the book, with some of them later shown in the short feature, highlight the resilience of African Americans in the face of adversity.

The book attracted the attention of Kathy Bratkowski, a producer with HEC-TV, who reached out to interview Zafar about her book. After conducting an interview of her, Bratkowski and Peter Foggy, the videographer, liked the progression of the film so much that they asked if they could go to Zafar’s house and watch her cook. They wanted to create a short feature film that would cover stories mentioned in “Recipes for Respect.”

After watching the final product that was sent to her months later, Zafar was impressed, initially thinking that it “was going to be different kinds of talking heads”—in other words a simple interview. Laughing, she revealed that, at first, she “wasn’t really sure what their [initial] creative vision was.” Months later, Bratkowski sent her an email with a screenshot showing that the feature of her book had been nominated for a Mid-America Emmy award.

“I was like—what? That’s crazy,” Zafar said, laughing even more.

Although the award would not specifically go to her, but rather to the producer and videographer, Zafar expressed her excitement for the possibility of the feature of her work winning the Emmy award.

“If we [win], I don’t even know what we’ll do, because I can’t even take myself out for dinner,” she said, laughing again.