My Ackee Tree

A Chef's Memoir of Finding Home in the Kitchen

By: Suzanne Barr, Suzanne Hancock - contributor

Narrated by: Suzanne Barr

Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

2023 Heritage Toronto Award, Nominated
2023 Taste Canada Awards - Culinary Narratives, Short-listed

For fans of The Measure of My Powers and Notes from a Young Black Chef, a memoir about food, family, and the recipes that brought one woman home when she needed it the most.

Suzanne Barr’s journey to become a chef started when she was 30. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she moved home to Florida to take care of her. Suzanne escorted her mother to doctor’s appointments, bathed her, and kept her company, but the hardest part of the experience was that she didn’t know how to cook for her. She didn’t even know where to begin.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2017 when Suzanne became the inaugural Chef-in-Residence at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. She wanted to create a menu that represented who she was as a chef and it emerged as a love letter to her mother. Her Rite of Passage Menu, as she called it, changed her. It started her on a journey that has brought her closer to her mother, to her ancestors, and to her Jamaican heritage.

But a lot has happened before and since.

My Ackee Tree tells the story of a woman who is always on the move, always seeking; who battles the stereotypes of being a Black female cook to become a culinary star in an industry beset by dated practices and landlords with too much power. From the ackee tree in front of her childhood home, through New York City, Atlanta, Hawaii, the Hamptons, and France, Suzanne takes us on her unpredictable journey, and at every turn, she finds light and comfort in the kitchen. Told in a voice as fresh and honest as her cooking, My Ackee Tree is a celebration of creativity, soul searching, and motherhood that asks, “How can I keep the things I love?”

©2022 Suzanne Barr (P)2022 Penguin Canada

Critic reviews

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 TASTE CANADA AWARDS* NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 HERITAGE TORONTO AWARDS

“Suzanne Barr is not only a brilliant chef but she's also a talented, honest storyteller. In My Ackee Tree she shares her amazing story, her love of food, music, family, adventure, and her journey to become a chef, wife, and mother. Her generous heart and soul is poured out on every page with such passion, emotion, humour, strength, and resilience. My Ackee Tree is inspiring and heartwarming—and such a gift.” —Chef Lynn Crawford, bestselling author of Farm to Chef and Hearth & Home

“Any good cook knows that layering one's seasonings is necessary to make a great dish, but in My Ackee Tree, Suzanne Barr shows how layers also make a life rich, full, and complex. Through the recounted conversations, meals, and recipes that thread together her upbringing, Suzanne brings food to life, and life to food. Communicating an inspiring and quintessentially Black experience of finding oneself on life's winding, rocky, joyful, not-so-straightforward road, her stories will ignite scent memories for anyone with roots in the Caribbean, and her recipes, when you cook them, will foster a love of that same world, no matter where you're from.” —David Zilber, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation