Outstanding cookbook author Toni Tipton-Martin puts history at the center of the American table

By Leslie Brenner

Editor’s note: Women have a history of writing the best cookbooks. That’s why throughout March — Women’s History Month — we’ll be featuring cookbooks by our favorite female authors.

It is history itself that animates the books of Toni Tipton-Martin, a culinary historian, writer, editor and cook who has become a powerful force for amplifying, celebrating and honoring the voices of Black cooks throughout American history.

Toni Tipton-Martin / Photograph by Pableaux Johnson

In 2015, Tipton-Martin published her award-winning The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks, which she followed in 2019 with Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking.

[Read more about Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee.]

Its pages are filled with delicious recognition of the contribution of African American cooks and chefs — and include some of our favorite recipes of the last year. I’m forever attached to Jubilee’s Pickled Shrimp, to Tipton-Martin’s Country-Style Potato Salad and to her Pork Chops in Lemon-Caper Sauce.

Pickled shrimp prepared from a recipe in ‘Jubilee’ by Toni Tipton-Martin

Its historical depth is just as appetizing — for instance a deep dive into green gumbo — gumbo z’herbes — that inspired an upcoming Cooks Without Borders story.

In September, Tipton-Martin — who began her career at the Los Angeles Times, and later led food coverage at the Cleveland Plain Dealer as its food editor — was named editor in chief of Cook’s Country.

'Jubilee,' 'Japanese Home Cooking' and 'American Sfoglino' are among the 2020 IACP Cookbook Award winners

The International Association of Culinary Professionals announced the winners of its 2020 Book Awards on Saturday, including its prestigious Cookbook Awards.

Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking (Clarkson Potter) won the top prize, Book of the Year, as well as the award for best cookbook in the American category. Francis Lam was the editor.

In our June review, we called Jubilee “deliciously inspiring,” discussing and including recipes for Tipton-Martin’s Layered Garden Salad, Sautéed Greens and Country-Style Potato Salad. In an earlier story, we raved about her recipe for Pickled Shrimp — which is one of our favorite recipes of the year to date.

Pickled Shrimp from Toni Tipton-Martin’s ‘Jubilee’ is one of our favorite recipes published in 2020.

Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors (Roost Books) won the prize for best new cookbook in the International category. Sara Berchholz was the editor.

“If you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume,” we wrote in our review (also in June). We offered up Sakai’s recipes for Okonomiyaki, Cucumber Sunomono and Koji-Marinated Salmon as evidence.

Okonomiyaki from ‘Japanese Home Cooking’ by Sonoko Sakai

While we haven’t gotten around to reviewing American Sfoglino yet, we do have a story about it in the works, and taking a deep dive into Funke’s pasta-making technique has forever changed the way we’ll approach making pasta by hand. The book won in the Chefs & Restaurants category. A mini-review will be coming soon.

Other titles winning IACP top honors include Pastry Love: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes by Joanne Chang (Baking category); The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs by the Editors at America’s Test Kitchen (Children, Youth & Family category); On the Hummus Route by Ariel Rosenthal, Orly Peli-Bronshtein and Dan Alexander (Culinary Travel category) and Milk Street: The New Rules: Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook by Christopher Kimball (General category). Find a complete list of winners and finalists here.

Congratulations to all the IACP winners and finalists!

Celebrating two centuries of African American cooking, Tipton-Martin’s ‘Jubilee’ earns a coveted Beard Award

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

RECIPE: Layered Garden Salad

RECIPE: Country Style Potato Salad

RECIPE: Sautéed Greens