Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking

Toni Tipton-Martin, the first African-American food editor of a daily American newspaper, joins us as the culinary Cooknote. Tipton-Martin is the author of the James Beard Award-winning book The Jemima Code, a history of African-American cooking found in—and between—the lines of three centuries’ worth of African-American cookbooks. She builds on that research in Jubilee, adapting recipes from those historic texts for the modern kitchen. Tipton-Martin will discuss a world of African-American cuisine—made by enslaved master chefs, free caterers, and black entrepreneurs and culinary stars—that goes far beyond soul food. It’s a cuisine that was developed in the homes of the elite and middle class, takes inspiration from around the globe, and is a diverse, varied style of cooking that has created much of what we know of as American cuisine.

Toni Tipton-Martin is a two-time James Beard Award winner. She is the author of Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, a beautifully photographed recipe collection that takes African American cooking beyond soul food, and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. The Jemima Code is also the title of a traveling exhibit, featuring larger-than-life images of African American cooks at work, curated from Martin’s gallery of authors. She is a contributor to the forthcoming anthology, Southern Women: More Than 100 Stories of Innovators, Artists, and Icons and to Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original. In 2005, she published an historic reprint of an early 20th century cookbook, The Blue Grass Cook Book, by Minnie C. Fox, which contains the first known photographs of African American cooks and presents a new portrait of a role model working women can respect and learn from today. Martin also is co-author of A Taste of Heritage: New African-American Cuisine and wrote the chapter on the South for Culinaria: The Food of the United States.

Susan Puckett is the James Beard-nominated former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has authored or collaborated on a dozen food-related books. Her cookbook/travelogue, Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler’s Journey Through the Soul of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and cookbook with Taqueria del Sol chef Eddie Hernandez, Turnip Greens and Tortillas: A Mexican Chef Spices Up the Southern Kitchen(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), were both selected as a Book All Georgians Should Read by the Georgia Center for the Book. Her most recent collaboration, The Deep End of Flavor: Recipes and Stories from New Orleans’ Premier Seafood Chef with Tenney Flynn (Gibbs Smith, 2019) was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards. She writes weekly cookbook reviews for the AJC and has contributed to Eating Well, The Local Palate, and other publications. She lives in Decatur with her husband, Ralph Ellis.

Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking  by Toni Tipton-Martin and Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey Through the Soul of the South by Susan Puckett available through local, indie bookseller Eagle Eye Book Shop

Cooknote: Jubilee Talks with Toni Tipton-Martin Sponsored by Springer Mountain Farms