Most of all, Schomburg was keen on exploring “how the negro genius has adapted receipts taught him by his masters just as he adapted the stern Methodist hymns and the dour tenets of Protestantism and how he has modified them to express his own peculiar artistic powers.” One scholar to come across the outline, sociologist John Brown Childs, evocatively wrote in 1984 that Schomburg’s vision highlighted how black foodways subverted and converted “the food of oppression into the staff of life.”įor reasons unknown, Schomburg’s proposal never came to fruition, but its spirit deeply infuses the work of food historian and writer Toni Tipton-Martin, especially her new cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking.

In his outline, Schomburg detailed plans to document some 400 recipes that would have cataloged everything from “traces of Africanisms which still persist in American dishes,” such as okra gumbo, to newer “‘invented’ dishes to take the bad taste of charity away from the victuals doled out by relief committees,” presumably including dishes built around offal or cheap beans and rice. With more than 100 recipes, from classics such as Sweet Potato Biscuits, Seafood Gumbo, Buttermilk Fried Chicken, and Pecan Pie with Bourbon to lesser-known but even more decadent dishes like Bourbon & Apple Hot Toddies, Spoon Bread, and Baked Ham Glazed with Champagne, Jubilee presents techniques, ingredients, and dishes that show the roots of African American cooking-deeply beautiful, culturally diverse, fit for celebration.SOMETIME DURING THE 1920s, noted Harlem historian and bibliophile Arturo Schomburg composed an ambitious proposal for one of the greatest African-American cookbooks never written. Through recipes and stories, we cook along with these pioneering figures, from enslaved chefs to middle- and upper-class writers and entrepreneurs.

In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin brings these masters into our kitchens. After all, if Thomas Jefferson introduced French haute cuisine to this country, who do you think actually cooked it? She’s introduced us to black cooks, some long forgotten, who established much of what’s considered to be our national cuisine. Throughout her career, Toni Tipton-Martin has shed new light on the history, breadth, and depth of African American cuisine.

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