Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking

The much-anticipated companion to Tipton-Martin’s 2015 James Beard Award-winning bibliographical The Jemima Code, Jubilee is the result of decades of research and the collection of almost 400 cookbooks, spanning two centuries of black cooking in the United States.

Jubilee is a restoration and preservation of recipes, many of them drawn from books that are rare and otherwise nigh lost to time. In her ode to those who came and cooked before us, Tipton-Martin credits and celebrates the cooks, chefs, or books associated with each recipe, enriching each with historical and cultural context. Most recipes have been adapted to and tested in a modern kitchen, a necessity in a work that includes dishes first recorded before the Civil War or before the standardization of measurements in the early twentieth-century.

Some recipes that have caught our eye and are on the to-do list:  catfish étouffée, inspired by the works of Leonard Roberts (The Negro Chef Cookbook, 1969) and Ethel Dixon (Big Mama’s Old Black Pot, 1987); Pierre Thaim’s Senegalese braised lamb shanks with peanut sauce; gumbo z’herbes derived from Leah Chase’s and Nathaniel Burton’s (Creole Feast, 1978) recipes; gingerbread waffles and cream inspired by Lucille Bishop Smith, Norma Jean and Carole Darden, and James Hemings.

This is an important, insightful integration of history and practice.

Hard cover.  Color photographs throughout.