T
hese days, it’s hard to get recognition for a cookbook if you aren’t already famous, whether via a restaurant kitchen or television. So when Toni Tipton-Martin’s latest book, “Jubilee,” started blowing up the internet last fall, it felt like a watershed moment. Bon Appétit listed it among the “fall cookbooks we’ve been waiting for all summer”; the New York Times decreed it one of “The Cookbooks You Need for 2020” and the New Yorker named it one of the “Best Cookbooks of 2019” (five months earlier, the New Yorker also listed Tipton-Martin’s previous book, “The Jemima Chronicles,” as one of the “Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far”). Since “Jubilee” hit the shelves late last autumn, Tipton-Martin has been in high demand on the food-talk circuit. After getting my hands on a copy, I added my name to the list. “Jubilee” lives up to its name: It’s a jubilant collection of recipes, wide-ranging, mouth-watering and intriguing. The most immediate appeal is in the photography—gorgeous, moody shots of delectablelooking dishes on warm, textured backgrounds, the plates, bowls, silver and linens creating a warm, lived-in atmosphere. What makes the book truly remarkable, however, is the light it shines on African Americans’ essential contributions to American cooking. Each recipe introduces a fascinating character (or six) who helped that dish become part of the canon of American cooking as we know it today. Tipton-Martin maps out the dish’s evolution with stories of the cooks who created it, history lessons and more. Baked beans, that New England classic? Scholars trace the tradition to New England sailors who picked up the idea from the Moors of North Africa. Macaroni and cheese, that childhood staple? It’s a French import by way of James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef de cuisine, who had trained in Paris. He prepared it for a White House dinner in 1802, and by 1845, it was considered classic enough to include in “The Virginia Housewife,” a then-essential guide to keeping house and home.
PORTRAIT PABLEAUX JOHNSON
GIVING RISE TO OVERLOOKED VOICES Bringing these contributions to light has been a long process for Tipton-Martin, who came to study African American cooking through her own experiences as a black woman working in the food world. “I came to food journalism as a college student,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Baltimore. “I was interested in investigative journalism, but I had a professor who suggested writing features as a way to get into the Los Angeles Times.” Tipton-Martin, who grew up in Los Angeles, soon had a regular byline in its food pages, but a staff job eluded her. Instead of getting a job on the hard news desk, she was assigned the nutrition beat. Not even 25 years old and with no background in nutrition, she threw herself into the challenge, taking night-school courses in physiology and public health. She was soon garnering awards for her writing from the likes of the American Heart Association. Still, the paper refused to give her the coveted “Times Staff Writer” status. “It wasn’t until Ruth Reichl came along that life changed for me there,” Tipton-Martin says.
Reichl, who took over the paper’s food section with Laurie Ochoa in 1988, easily recalls Tipton-Martin’s talent and mettle. “She was one of the only young people on staff and one of the few African American writers in the food world,” Reichl says. “I thought, ‘They have her doing nutrition writing? What a wasted resource!’ ” One of the first stories Tipton-Martin did for Reichl was a profile of a single mother on food stamps. “We had to set up a 501(c) after that story came out,” Reichl says; one local celebrity contacted the paper in order to buy the mother a phone and pay for service for a year. With Reichl’s continued encouragement, Tipton-Martin blossomed, finding her own voice and an appreciation for storytelling. Tipton-Martin went on to Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, becoming the first African American woman to be food editor at a major U.S. newspaper. She was also one of the founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance as well as Foodways Texas, both organizations dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting local foods and food cultures. She has been to the White House twice as a guest of Michelle Obama for her outreach to help families live healthier lives. Yet, she says, she felt like something was missing. “I never felt connected,” she recalls. “I wasn’t sure what it was, what that sense of loss was I was feeling.”
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