Staff Picks
20 Books Which Celebrate African American Culinary History and Experience
- Mona Verma
- Saturday, June 19, 2021
Collection
African American food history is rich and it has intrinsically influenced the development of American cuisine. Any discussion of the culinary heritage of America cannot be complete without noting the contributions of Black people. Very often, these significant contributions are overlooked or minimized when they should be appreciated and recognized. Here are a few books which celebrate the flavorful African American cuisine and its history.
What the Slaves Ate
Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives
Published in 2009
Black Girl Baking
Wholesome Recipes Inspired by a Soulful Upbringing
Published in 2018
Growing up sensitive and slightly awkward in a race-conscious space, Guy decided early on that good food is the most powerful way to connect, understand, and heal. She leads readers on a sensual baking journey, using the fives senses, as she retells food memories with ingredients that involve whole flours, less refined sugar, and vegan alternatives.
Cooking
Published in 1997
Introduces the influence of African-based foods, cooking techniques, and traditions to American culinary history.
Black Smoke
African Americans and the United States of Barbecue
Published in 2021
"Across America, the pure love and popularity of barbecue cookery has gone through the roof. Prepared in one regional style or another, in the South and beyond, barbecue is one of the nation's most distinctive culinary arts. And people aren't just eating it; they're also reading books and articles and watching TV shows about it. But why is it, asks Adrian Miller--admitted 'cuehead and longtime certified barbecue judge--that in today's barbecue culture African Americans don't get much love? In Black Smoke, Miller chronicles how Black barbecuers, pitmasters, and restaurateurs helped develop this cornerstone of American foodways and how they are coming into their own today"-- Provided by publisher.
The President's Kitchen Cabinet
The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas
Published in 2017
James Beard award-winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history. Daisy McAfee Bonner, for example, FDR's cook at his Warm Springs retreat, described the president's final day on earth in 1945, when he was struck down just as his lunchtime cheese souffle emerged from the oven. Sorrowfully, but with a cook's pride, she recalled, "He never ate that souffle, but it never fell until the minute he died." A treasury of information about cooking techniques and equipment, the book includes twenty recipes for which black chefs were celebrated. From Samuel Fraunces's "onions done in the Brazilian way" for George Washington to Zephyr Wright's popovers, beloved by LBJ's family, Miller highlights African Americans' contributions to our shared American foodways. Surveying the labor of enslaved people during the antebellum period and the gradual opening of employment after Emancipation, Miller highlights how food-related work slowly became professionalized and the important part African Americans played in that process. His chronicle of the daily table in the White House proclaims a fascinating new American story.
Hog & Hominy
Soul Food from Africa to America
Published in 2008
Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans throughout history. Opie shows how food can be an indicator of social position, a site of community building and cultural identity, and a juncture at which different cultural traditions can develop and impact the collective health of a community.
Southern Food and Civil Rights
Feeding the Revolution
Published in 2017
Food has been and continues to be an essential part of any movement for progressive change. From home cooks and professional chefs to local eateries and bakeries, food has helped activists continue marching for change for generations. Paschal's restaurant in Atlanta provided safety and comfort food for civil rights leaders. Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam operated their own farms, dairies and bakeries in the 1960s. "The Sandwich Brigade" organized efforts to feed the thousands at the March on Washington. Author Fred Opie details the ways southern food nourished the fight for freedom, along with cherished recipes associated with the era.
Bress 'n' Nyam
Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-generation Farmer
Published in 2021
"More than 100 heirloom recipes from a dynamic chef and farmer working the lands of his great-great-great grandfather. From Hot Buttermilk Biscuits and Sweet Potato Pie to Salmon Cakes on Pepper Rice and Gullah Fish Stew, Gullah-Geechee food is an essential cuisine of American history. It is the culinary representation of the ocean, rivers, and rich fertile loam in and around the coastal South. From the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida, this is where descendants of enslaved Africans came together to makeextraordinary food, speaking the African Creole language called Gullah-Geechee. In this groundbreaking and beautiful cookbook, Matthew Raiford pays homage to this cuisine that nurtured his family for seven generations. In 2010, Raiford's Nana handed overthe deed to the family farm to him and his sister, and Raiford rose to the occasion, nurturing the farm that his great-great-great grandfather, a freed slave, purchased in 1874. In this collection of heritage and updated recipes, he traces a history of community and family brought together by food"-- Provided by publisher.
Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way
Smokin' Joe Butter Beans, Ol' 'fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-bush Blackberry Dumpling, & Other Sea Island Favorites
Published in 2003
Meals, Music, and Muses
Recipes from My African American Kitchen
Published in 2020
""Alexander Smalls has owned, conceptualized, and helmed some of New York's most iconic African American restaurants. Now, he follows up the James Beard award-winning Between Harlem and Heaven with Meals, Music, and Muses, a look at his world glimpsed through the lenses of music, food, culture, and history. It is a must-read journey through a life well lived and in recipe and reminiscence details the musical forms learned, the friends and family who instructed, and the foods shared along the way." JessicaB. Harris "If wine is bottled poetry, and jazz is brown sugar sprinkled in your ear, then Meals, Music, and Muses is a smorgasbord of fine words and sounds, a delicious symphony of haute cuisine that'll make you wanna kiss your momma, then thank the ancestors for making a way out of no way-for Hoppin' John Cakes and Grits and Sage Sausage Gravy and Frogmore Stew and all the recipes Alexander Smalls has reimagined so elegantly." Kwame Alexander "I had the great honor of being a guest at one of Alexander'sfamous Sunday brunches in his beautiful brownstone in Harlem. The food was unbelievably delicious! It was a magical afternoon that I will never forget." Tina Knowles-Lawson "In Meals, Music, and Muses, Alexander creates a lyrical culinary anthology of our lives. A symphonic composition full of stories, contemporary southern recipes that celebrates the food and musical genres that influenced the history of America... He sets the table in a unique way from jazz to blues to divas on a plate...This is not your mother's cookbook..." Dee Dee Bridgewater"-- Provided by publisher.
Vibration Cooking, Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl
Published in 2011
Vibration Cooking was first published in 1970, not long after the term "soul food" gained common use. While critics were quick to categorize her as a proponent of soul food, Smart-Grosvenor wanted to keep the discussion of her cookbook/memoir focused on its message of food as a source of pride and validation of black womanhood and black "consciousness raising." This edition features a foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson placing the book in historical context and discussing Smart-Grosvenor's approach to food and culture. A new preface by the author details how she came to write the book. --from the publisher.
The Jemima Code
Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
Published in 2015
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. Tipton-Martin looks at 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. 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.
Jubilee
Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking
Published in 2019
"More than 100 recipes that paint a rich, varied picture of the true history of African American cooking--from a James Beard Award-winning food writer"--Amazon.com.
The Cooking Gene
A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
Published in 2017
"A memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces the paths of the author's ancestors (black and white) through the crucible of slavery to show its effects on our food today"-- Provided by publisher.
Rice
Published in 2021
"Among the staple foods most welcomed on southern tables-and on tables around the world-rice is without question the most versatile. As Michael Twitty observes, depending on regional tastes, rice may be enjoyed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; as main dish, side dish, and snack; in dishes savory and sweet. As Twitty's fifty-one recipes deliciously demonstrate, rice stars in Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast kitchens, as well as in the kitchens of cooks from around the world who are now at home in the South. Exploring rice's culinary history and African diasporic identity, Twitty shows how to make the southern classics as well as international dishes-everything from Savannah Rice Waffles to Ghananian Crab Stew"-- Provided by publisher.
Building Houses out of Chicken Legs
Black Women, Food, and Power
Published in 2006
Chicken--both the bird and the food--has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these complex relationships clarifies how present associations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.