OP: Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook
Signet, 1969. Paperback. Very Good Minus. Third printing.
Certain cookbooks come equipped with a bit of lore, and this is very much one of them. The author—whose real name might have been Addie Mae Strobel, though no one really seems to know—ran a speakeasy-like supper club out of her 10th St apartment in NYC’s East Village from 1960 to 1989.
To dine at The Little Kitchen, one had to ring the bell, and Princess Pamela would take a look at you from her second floor window, decide if you seemed all right, and, if you were, she’d toss down the keys to let yourself in. Even when Strobel moved her restaurant to a storefront on Houston St., diners still had to knock and duck under the metal gate, which was never drawn the whole way up.
After the restaurant suddenly closed and Strobel apparently disappeared in 1998, all that remained was her Soul Food Cookbook (1969) and the memories of her clientele—everyone from Andy Warhol and Pearl Bailey to Gloria Steinem and Craig Claiborne.
Matt and Ted Lee, who reissued the book in 2017, describe the original paperback: “Like her tiny restaurants…[the cookbook] almost begged you to walk on by. Printed on stiff brown newsprint in the curt format of a pulp-fiction paperback, it was virtually impossible to deploy in the kitchen without splitting the spine and straining the eyes.” Yet, those who give the diminutive book a chance are rewarded with not only the cooking of Strobel’s Spartanburg, SC upbringing but also her poetry, which accompanies every recipe on the facing page.
Fried chicken, oxtail, green corn griddle cakes, molasses pie, and peach dumplings—this is the stick-to-your-ribs fare that’ll leave every diner happy and full. “When you hear somebody/ sighin’ and eatin’/ with his eyes closed,/ then y’ know somebody/ in the kitchen keep/ hers wide open.”
We are pleased to offer here a third printing of the original paperback edition by Signet, in better condition than most we’ve seen. Discolored and lightly soiled, the spine creased but not cracked, the copy promises to last with enough care.
