Norma Shirley never wrote a cookbook and never had her own television show. Yet the Jamaican chef and prolific restaurateur—despite working in an era when The New York Times dismissed her home region as “an area that was visited for its climate and beaches but not for its cuisine”—forever altered American food culture. Even as Shirley garnered recognition from the likes of Vogue and the James Beard Foundation, the media seemed unsure how to cover her, often resorting to calling her “the Julia Child of Jamaica,” a reductive comparison she…
