Easter feast inspired by African-american cooking
Braised celery and gingerbread add traditional African-american flair
Sautéed in lamb drippings and simmered in chicken stock, Toni Tipton-martin’s braised celery exemplifies the culinary deftness of her African-american ancestors.
As a nod to S. Thomas Bivins, she calls for the sauce to be thickened at the last minute with beurre manié — just as he did in a recipe for stewed celery published in his 1912 tome, The Southern Cookbook.
The technique also takes inspiration from legendary chef and writer Edna Lewis, who once served a butter- and broth-bathed version, garnished with fresh parsley.
Tipton-martin draws upon the rich legacy of African-american cooking which, before her own James Beard Award-winning 2015 bibliography, The Jemima Code, had gone largely uncharted.
She demonstrates the skill and knowledge necessary to transform a foundational ingredient into something exquisite.
The recipe, which she developed on an Easter Sunday after roasting a leg of lamb for her family, is one of more than 100 in her followup cookbook, Jubilee (Clarkson Potter, 2019).
Both books share the same source material: Tipton-martin’s library of nearly 400 black cookbooks — written primarily by self-published experts — dating as far back as 1827.
The result of at least 30 years of collecting and “a near fortune” spent at rare and antique booksellers, they illuminate the diversity of African-american cuisine.
Pushing past labels such as
“Southern” and “soul,” she illustrates its influence on American cooking as a whole.
“Until now, African-americans have been narrowly defined by the food that is prepared at home.
“My effort is not to marginalize or degrade that work, that cooking,” Tipton-martin says. “It certainly is an important, visible part of who we are — all that we’ve accomplished in terms of our ability to create something nutritious and delicious out of meagre supplies. But what has been neglected is the larger story.
“African-americans have fulfilled many roles in the culinary world and we haven’t spoken at all about the food that they prepare on the job. We honour celebrity cooks for the food that they prepare in their restaurants and in their cookbooks, but we know little about what they do at home.
“And yet African-americans have been largely defined exclusively by the home realm and not by what they’re offering at a professional level.”
In Jubilee, Tipton-martin focuses on dishes created by the likes of bakery shop owners, butlers, caterers, chefs, plantation cooks and rice and nut cake vendors.
In adapting historical recipes for modern kitchens, sharing reference points and tracing their evolution, Tipton-martin says she hopes to inspire the current generation to take them in new directions.