The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Celebrating African American cuisine
For Toni Tipton-Martin, ‘Jubilee’ is about joy.
For Toni Tipton-Martin, it’s never just about the recipes. It’s about the history, the struggle. It’s about recognizing the marvelous variety of African American cooking, and giving it the dignity and respect it deserves.
With her fastidiously researched, sublimely photographed new cookbook, “Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking” (Clarkson Potter, $35), the pioneering, Los Angeles-born food writer who now lives in Baltimore sets about busting the stereotypes long assigned to black cuisine in America.
Bring up African American food, she says, and many people go straight to the fried chicken and collards. They pigeon-hole it as soul food, or Southern food, thereby limiting the cuisine to the painful legacy of slavery. But isn’t eating supposed to be joyful?
As she writes in her introduction to “Jubilee,” the brilliant follow-up to her James Beard Award-winning “The Jemima Code” from 2015: “We hear less … about the cooking that can be traced to free people of color, the well-trained enslaved and skilled working class, entrepreneurs, and the black privileged class.”
With this erudite volume, Tipton-Martin sets out to demonstrate, via recipes, how blacks have long embraced “classic techniques, formal training, global flavors, and local ingredients” — attributes she believes would have catapulted them to celebrity in today’s world.
To make her case, she posits 125 recipes, ranging from the fancy to the everyday: Champagne Cocktails and Sorrel (Hibiscus) Tea from Jamaica. Spanish Cornbread and Nigerian Black-Eyed Pea Fritters. Braised Celery and (fried) Okra Salad. Senegalesestyle Braised Lamb Shanks With Peanut Sauce and Pork Chops with Rich Caper-Lemon Sauce. Sweet Potato-Mango Cake and Southern Pecan Pie Laced with Whiskey.
Often, the recipes represent the way Tipton-Martin likes to cook and entertain at home. She grew up in an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood, trick-or-treating at the home of Ray Charles (he handed out McDonald’s cheeseburgers) and well acquainted with entertainment-industry giants such as Berry Gordy. “We just
went to school with them and hung out,” she said in an interview with The Atlanta JournalConstitution. “There was no pretension about it.”
Her mom was a vegetarian who made sure her family nourished their bodies with the bounty of California produce. As a journalism major at the University of Southern California, Tipton-Martin got a part-time job at a small weekly newspaper. When the food editor left, she was tasked with editing the recipes. She soon discovered she was more interested in the stories behind the recipes.
In the ’80s, right after college, Tipton-Martin was hired by the Los Angeles Times as a part-time nutrition writer. She felt somewhat limited and wanted to go deeper. Her boss, the legendary Ruth Reichl, told her “to go out into the streets of LA” and not come back until she knew what she wanted to do.
“I was gone for three days and when I came back, I had a story about my Mormon neighbors that did not include any recipes,” she recalls. At the time, publishing a food story without recipes was virtually unheard of. Yet the paper decided to run the article, and Tipton-Martin’s career as a food-culture reporter was launched. In 1991, she moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where she became the first black food editor of a major American daily.
She eventually left newspapers to raise her family, but she stayed in touch with the food world. At a food-journalism conference in Atlanta in 1994, the imminent Southern-food historian John Egerton gave her “The Kentucky Cookbook, Easy and Simple for any Cook.” Authored by a “colored woman,” it was published in 1912 and penned by Mrs. W.T. Hayes. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, in the same way he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it,” Tipton-Mar
tin said. “But it really kicked off my curiosity about black cookbooks.”
Soon after, she began collecting historic cookbooks in a serious way. (Today she has more than 400 by black authors.) In 2015, “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks” appeared to wide acclaim. It’s an annotated bibliography of 150 black cookbooks, from Malinda Russell’s “A Domestic Cook Book” (1866) to Jessica B. Harris’ “Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons” (1989).
“The title ‘The Jemima Code’ is a way for me to express our love-hate relationship with the history of black women the kitchen,” Tipton-Martin said. “Black cooks were loved, beloved for all that they accomplished. But they were disparaged at the same time, and memorialized by the image of a mammy cook in the plantation South, as a perpetual slave. And that bleeds over onto our concepts of kitchen work, and obviously yields the phrase, ‘slaving in the kitchen.’ So then who wants to cook after that? Not our children. Not anybody! I’m on a mission to change that and get us cooking again.”
With “Jubilee,” she gives us plenty of reasons to celebrate.