Toni Tipton-Martin

These 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.

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.”

“This frees everyone from the boundaries that limit notions of

African American cooking to survival.”

—Toni Tipton-Martin

RECIPE AND PHOTOS REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM “JUBILEE: RECIPES FROM

TWO CENTURIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN

COOKING” BY TONI TIPTON-MARTIN, COPYRIGHT © 2019. PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JERRELLE GUY. PUBLISHED BY CLARKSON POTTER, A DIVISION OF

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

She eventually connected that loss to the lack of people like her in the American food story. As she points out in “Jubilee,” the conversation around African American cuisine tends to be confined to stories about poverty and survival. There are few depictions of the black family life she grew up with—in a tree-lined neighborhood of L.A. where her mom tended a lavish garden—or the one she had made for her own four kids, where meals were as varied and international as the city around them.

Tipton-Martin thought of the concept sankofa, a Ghanaian word she translates as “go back and get it,” or “to reach back,” which is essentially to look to the people who came before you. “The concept of sankofa was important to me in teaching my children— and any others who would listen—that we had role models and traditions that existed before the experience of enslavement,” TiptonMartin says. “That is important if we’re going to inspire the next generation on to great things.” She began searching out black voices in everything she could get her hands on, from slave narratives to Harlem Renaissance poetry to cookbooks.

It was in this last category that she discovered a vast resource of largely overlooked voices. Paging through her cookbook collection—now over 400 volumes spanning two centuries—she began uncovering powerful proof of African American cooking as multifaceted, skilled, learned and sophisticated. In recipe after recipe, she noted the influence of the highly trained African American chefs who ran plantation kitchens all across the south, and others who ran well-regarded restaurants in New York City. These cooks not only drew upon the local cuisine, but they brought with them influences from around the world, including Parisian training and Brazilian culture.

She also made connections to Africa that others may have overlooked. In a recipe for akara, a Nigerian black-eyed pea fritter, she reveals a connection to the cornmeal fritters American Southerners know as hushpuppies. She traces gumbo, a New Orleans’ favorite, to West Africa, where gombo means okra, the vegetable that is used to give the soup body. In a recipe for lamb curry, she highlights a spice route from Malaysia and India to South Africa to the Caribbean, where the Jamaicans applied it to the local goat while the inhabitants of the French islands preferred lamb.

There are the influences that arose from slaves spending their days cooking extravagant meals for people with means. Tipton-Martin makes compelling connections from things like biscuits to the British tradition of afternoon tea. In a section of the book she titles “The Cornbread Flight,” she shows how cooks transformed basic baked corn pone (unleavened corn bread) into spoon bread, which is a tender, airy cornbread soufflé. These practices would be carried forward to generations with more freedom. Tipton-Martin shares with me her surprise when she found a cookbook describing 1940s-era tea parties and luncheons that featured fancy foods pulled from newspaper columns and magazines. “Once I had that as a perspective, then I didn’t have to be that surprised when I found recipes like Celery Victor,” she says. That dish gives celery a royal treatment, braising it until tender in stock, then thickening the juice with a knob of beurre manie (a French trick of blending butter with flour to use as a thickener) and enriching it with cream. It’s one of the many recipes she includes in “Jubilee” that shows what she calls the sumptuous side of African American cooking—the side that has long been overlooked.

KITCHEN CONFIDENCE One reason that it has taken so long to recognize African American contributions stems from the time and expertise required to really understand the early cookbooks. “That was a great moment of appreciation for all those years I spent understanding the mechanics of recipes,” Tipton-Martin says with a dry chuckle. “Many recipes had no hednotes. Sometimes there’s no instructions; sometimes there’s no method.” But rather than a sign of the cook’s illiteracy, as has often been assumed, the lack was a sign of their confidence in the kitchen, says Tipton-Martin. “Some of the recipes would begin ‘bake the cake in the usual way’ and then list ingredients because the cook perceived that to be the knowledge,” she points out. Really, it’s similar to the way recipes are handed out in a professional kitchen: You might get a piece of paper with ingredients and amounts but no instructions on how to put them together because it’s assumed you already know how.

There is also language to consider. “A lot of the recipes were for dishes in gravy, or ‘smothered,’” Tipton-Martin says. “Those are very Southern, soul terms. But if we were looking at this through another lens, this would be [sauce thickened with] a beurre manie. Or it would be béchamel,” one of the foundational sauces of classic French cooking. “But they just called it gravy.”

Looking beyond the names to the actual cooking techniques can put a dish in a new light. Stewed chicken? That’s what the French call chicken fricassee. Crawfish soup? Add cream and that’s bisque, or as Mary Moore Brenner called it in her 1932 cookbook, potage d’écrevisses. “I don’t think anybody was standing around in their kitchen talking about macaroni and cheese in terms of making a béchamel sauce,” Tipton-Martin says, but the fact is those early cooks weren’t just melting Velveeta. They were making a cheese sauce with béchamel.

As Tipton-Martin intended, tracing these classic recipes to the talented and highly trained cooks recasts the cooks’ place in history. It also helps us recognize the very real contributions African Americans have made to what we consider essential American cuisine today— learning, for example, that Bisquick owes its inspiration to a black chef pumping out light, airy biscuits from the kitchen of a train dining car, or that Nearest Green, a black master distiller, created the recipe for that most American of liquors, Jack Daniel’s.

That’s the point of “Jubilee,” Tipton-Martin says. “[It] was really a way to express joy and celebration of freedom,” she explains. “This frees everyone from the boundaries that limit notions of African American cooking to survival. It means that chefs are free to cook whatever they like. It means that diners can now enter restaurants unbound by expectations of what’s going to be on the plate because of the color of the skin of the chef. It means that reviewers are now freer to contemplate the real quality of the cooking, not whether it matches this mysterious soul genre.”

Asked how she would describe the food in “Jubilee,” she goes back to that one simple, evocative word: sumptuous. To taste what she means, try the wilted greens salad she offers here. While it reaches back to the ancient traditions of foraging for greens, the colorful salad and its warm bacon vinaigrette bath would fit right in on the menu of any farm-to-table restaurant from here to Paris. 

Wilted Mixed Greens with Bacon MAKES 8 TO 10 SERVINGS

The dish we’ve come to know as warm spinach salad—greens tossed with a hot bacon dressing—wasn’t really a salad at all, to hear the black cookbook authors tell it through the years. Survey the vegetables section of soul food and early 20th century black cookbooks and look for this uberpopular combination with titles like “wilted” or “killed” lettuce or spinach, or you might miss it.

Back in the day, farm folks tossed combinations of bitter greens and herbs, such as escarole, chicory, purslane and watercress, with a warm dressing they stirred together right in a hot skillet after cooking bacon. In harder times, wild weeds like dandelion and poke, as in “poke sallet,” answered the call.

Soul cooks carried on the tradition of wilting lettuce leaves instead of spinach. … I returned to the wilted lettuce tradition here with so-called power greens. These greens are dark and rich in vitamins and minerals and taste delicious. Try it my way, then experiment with your favorite combination of tender baby greens and herbs.

2 pounds mixed tender greens (spinach, arugula, chard, baby kale, watercress) 4 radishes, thinly sliced ½ cup thinly sliced red onion 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced 1 cup grape tomatoes, cut into halves 8 slices bacon 2⁄3 cup cider vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar 2 teaspoons salt ¼ teaspoon black pepper 1⁄3 cup crumbled blue cheese (optional)

1. In a large salad bowl, toss together the greens, radishes, onion, eggs and tomatoes. 2. In a large skillet, cook the bacon over medium heat until crisp, about 7 minutes. Leaving the rendered bacon fat in the skillet, remove the bacon to drain on paper towels and crumble when cool enough to handle. 3. Heat the bacon fat in the skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in the vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper. Swirl the pan over the heat for 1 to 2 minutes to concentrate the flavors and slightly thicken the dressing. Pour the hot dressing over the greens and toss quickly to coat. Sprinkle the greens with the crumbled bacon and blue cheese (if using).

First-Rate Mates

White wine and seafood always chart a clear course, but depending on the fish, you can add in some reds

BY MARY SUBIALKA

You won’t have to walk the plank if you choose the “wrong” wine to go with a seafood meal, but selecting a good mate can help complement the flavor components to create a tasteful match. While the best food and wine pairings are ultimately the ones you enjoy, the traditional tendency to pair seafood with white wine does have merit. The tannins in red wine can taste a bit metallic with white fish and shellfish, so it is best to avoid pairing Cabernet Sauvignon, Chianti, Merlot and Syrah with seafood. However, tuna, salmon and other full-flavored fish can make good partners with lighter reds such as Beaujolais and Pinot Noir as well as rosé.

Go-to white wines include Albariño, unoaked Chardonnay, Pinot Gris/Grigio, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier and the semi-sparkling Portuguese Vinho Verde (especially with fish tacos). Try Sauvignon Blanc with steamed clams, and if you’re serving linguine with clam sauce, uncork a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Sea bass, cod and other firm-fleshed fish can also work with a full-bodied white such as oaked Chardonnay. Classic French partners for oysters are Chablis (which is Chardonnay), Champagne and Sancerre (which is Sauvignon Blanc).

Enjoying some lobster salad this summer? Chablis, Chenin Blanc, Riesling and, of course, Champagne are perfect accompaniments. If the lobster is served hot with drawn butter, try a big buttery Chardonnay with the rich delicacy. 