Sweet Home Cafe Cookbook: A Celebration of African American Cooking

Featuring recipes from the restaurant at the National Museum of African American History & Culture, this handsome collection offers historically-rooted classic dishes along with smart contemporary recipes that capture the ever-evolving spirit of the African-American table.

Throughout the book the authors provide frequent sidebars and headnotes to discuss regional cuisines and traditions, important ingredients (including many that were brought to the New World by enslaved Africans),  and call attention to historically important cooks and other culinary figures.

Yet this is foremost a cookbook, full of recipes that are inextricably American. Some are clearly part of the country's past: Louis Armstrong's red beans and rice recipe; pickled okra; bourbon pecan pie.

Others acknowledge a future in which new ideas inform the treatment of traditional ingredients: kale sprouts with sorghum and benne; black-eye pea, corn, and mushroom empanadas; charred peach and jalapeño chutney.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.