New book explores Black cocktail history
While many in the world of cocktails are familiar with Tom Bullock, renowned for his juleps and long considered the first African American bartender to publish a cocktail manual, fewer know the work of Atholene Peyton, a home economics teacher whose 1906 “Peytonia Cook Book” predated Bullock's by a decade.
Peyton's story is just one told in Toni Tipton-Martin's new book, “Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice: Cocktails From Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks,” a chronicle of the ways Black people contributed to American cocktail culture.
“This is really a work of investigative journalism. It's not just a book of cocktails,” said Tipton-Martin, a James Beard award-winning author of several cookbooks and the editor of Cook's Country magazine, who pored through centuries' worth of published recipes for her new work.
The book is a continuation of her 2015 book, “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks,” which credited Black women for much of the country's culinary history, and her 2019 follow-up, “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking.”
“What Toni has done here is essentially create a mixologist's parallel to what she did in `Jubilee,'” said Jessica B. Harris, the author of “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America,” which has been adapted as a Netflix series. “The two books become a diptych of the food of African Americans, as revealed through their cookbooks.”
Culinary journey
Tipton-Martin owns a vast collection of old cookbooks by Black authors from as early as 1827, and has used that foundation to propel the research and historical context her books are famous for.
For her new book, she relied on cookbooks published by early Black bartenders like Bullock in 1917 and Julian Anderson in 1919. But she also uncovered the contributions of Peyton, a teacher born in Louisville, Kentucky, whose “Peytonia Cook Book” included a chapter on drinks, with recipes for juleps, gin fizzes, eggnog, a whiskey sour and a manhattan. (Tipton-Martin discusses Peyton's Champagne punch in her new book.)
“I can hear the voice of the cook or bar master claiming their intellectual property,” Tipton-Martin said.
“Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice” is organized chronologically by craft, which gave Tipton-Martin the space to write about “all of that Black drink history.” She starts with teaching readers how to brew beer and ferment wine. Enslaved and free Black women made those drinks and built beverage enterprises during the antebellum era. Punchbowl drinks tell the stories of Black caterers and food entrepreneurs.
Other chapters are dedicated to the Black bartenders who made layered drinks at taverns in the late 18th century. She ends the book with a section on how some Black people today refer to liquor as a form of empowerment, especially in rap lyrics.