A piece of culinary news that in less turbulent times would have made a much bigger noise got a bit drowned out last week: Toni Tipton-Martin’s deliciously inspiring Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking won the 2020 James Beard Award for the best American cookbook. It’s a shame the moment was missed because a robust, thoughtful and groundbreaking celebration of African-American cooking and culture could not be more timely.
A formidable scholar, culinary historian and cultural historian as well as a cook, Tipton-Martin won her first Beard Award four years ago. That was for The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks — an annotated bibliography of the author’s collection of rare, historical African-American cookbooks, published in 2015.
To create Jubilee, Tipton-Martin culled more than 100 recipes from those books; collectively they represent her curation of seminal African-American cooking. Being honored with the Beard Award honor puts them squarely in the center of the American table.
At Cooks Without Borders, we had just started cooking from Jubilee when Covid shut us in mid-March. I was eager to explore the enticing recipes, sticking Post-its on scores of recipes for which I couldn’t yet procure the necessary ingredients: Deviled Crab, Okra Gumbo, Peach-Buttermilk Ice Cream.
But there were plenty of dishes I was able to make, and with delicious results: a Biscuit-Topped Chicken Pot Pie, the Savannah Pickled Shrimp I wrote about last month, wonderful Sautéed Greens that felt like the best thing imaginable for our immune systems during a pandemic.
As I flipped through, enjoying the beautiful photos by Jerrelle Guy, I was taken with Tipton-Martin’s stories, and her background. Like me, she grew up in Southern California (we were both born in L.A., six months apart). Just out of college, she joined The Los Angeles Times as a food and nutrition writer (I served there as Food Editor 23 years later).
She grew up in the tony Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, a neighborhood she describes as “home to the black elite — doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and white-collar professionals.” There, at the home her mother treated like an “urban farm,” she thrilled to tender lettuces, avocados and California stone fruits plucked from the garden.
Some of my favorite recipes in the book are very vegetable-forward: those greens; a delightful Layered Salad with Garlic and Herb Dressing; an old-fashioned Country-Style Potato Salad that took me back to my own Southern California childhood (it is nearly identical to the one my mom used to make).
Until she wrote The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin felt isolated as a food writer. “My culinary heritage — and the larger story of African American food that encompasses the middle class and the well-to-do — was lost in a world that confined the black experience to poverty, survival, and soul food,” she explains in her intro. Jubilee “broadens the African American food story. It celebrates the enslaved and the free, the working class, the middle class, and the elite.”
For me, In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, exploring a powerful African American cookbook has taken on a different quality; it feels more urgent. A month ago, I was skimming through, enjoying, cooking, hanging out with the book. Now I’m more focused — on Tipton-Martin’s intentions, on the stories of the cooks, on the ingredients and what they mean, on the origins of dishes.
I’ve learned, for instance, that gumbo, from the beginning, was all about okra; in several West African languages the word for okra is gombo. The vegetable, Tipton-Martin writes, is “mucilaginous when sliced and cooked. Devotees love that slime; it thickens gumbo and gives the stew body.” Native American Filé, also known as sassafras flour, came into the gumbo picture as a thickener later, as did roux, which came from French and Creole cooks. “After that, soups thickened with any combination of these ingredients started to bear the name ‘gumbo.’”
Now I really need to cook that gumbo I’d been eyeing for months. Yesterday I ventured out to the supermarket, where I’d only just spotted okra a few days before. It was gone, and so was the crabmeat. So the gumbo will have to wait.
But I don’t have to wait to recommend Jubilee — not just to cooks and people with a passion for food, but to everyone who wants to better understand African-American culture.
In an interview in March with Saveur magazine, Tipton-Martin was asked what she hopes people will gain from the book besides the beautiful recipes and scrumptious food. “One answer,” she said, “would be to determine what we can all do in our own spheres of influence to bring down the barriers constructed through the stereotypes that divide us.”
Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, by Toni Tipton-Martin, Clarkson Potter, $35