From the organization that brought us The Black Family Reunion cookbooks comes The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, a fun, richly brewed collection of recipes, historical facts, photos, and personal anecdotes. First published in 1958 by the National Council of Negro Women, it includes contributions from members in thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia and offers exceptional insight into American history and the African-American community at the time of its publication. As John Hope Franklin (whose own family owns a copy of the book) points out, much of the cultural information in the cookbook has never been passed down to successive generations. Arranged according to the calendar year, the cookbook opens with a cake to be baked in celebration of both New Year's Day and the Emancipation Proclamation. Scattered among the recipes one finds excerpts from documents such as the Gettysburg Address and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Tributes to well-known figures like Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington appear alongside brief bios and recipes in celebration of important but obscured figures. This delightful collection of delicious recipes helps us commemorate African-American history throughout the year.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

This 1904 book evokes the sights, smells, and tastes of Kentucky in the 1900s. Most importantly, the book was groundbreaking, over one hundred years ago, in its celebration of the vital role Black women played in building and sustaining the tradition of Southern cooking and Southern hospitality.

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016 Art of Eating Prize, 2015 BCALA Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2016 Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind. The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking