July 2, 2024
Photos by Mary Kang
Dear Bitter Southerners,
When some people read cookbooks, they come away with ideas for getting dinner on the table. Others engage their imaginations with intriguing specialties from faraway lands. I do those things, too. I also make deep connections with the authors — mostly women — as guardians of tradition, whether we commune over instructions for preparing a thick cream gravy or memories of visits to grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. Cookbooks enable me to linger with great American cooks, listening for encouragement, whispered words of wisdom, a sense of place. For me, home is wherever my cookbook collection is.
In my library, these women and their communities are alive. Lost souls, both theirs and mine, are saved.
I remember the first time I gave a lecture about cooking in the American South. It was 2003 in a small classroom at the College of Charleston. As I made my way to the podium, a nervous fluttering swirled inside my belly, becoming more feverish with every step. Scholars stared as I placed my notes on the lectern. Under my breath I prayed to the ancestors: “Please, please don’t leave me.”
Miraculously, a peaceful calm stilled my racing heartbeat. The fluttering subsided, and I began the talk, provocatively titled, “Ladies and Wenches in the Plantation Kitchen,” with these words:
“I appreciate the technical proficiency behind recipe development and the academic rigor associated with culinary anthropology and foodways studies, but my interest lies with the folks who by and large did the cooking in America — the women; specifically, the Black women.”
The audience was rapt.
At the time, historians had paid little attention to the role households played in shaping America’s food culture. White women existed in romanticized notions of Old South living and images of the delicate Southern “lady.” African American women, if they were mentioned at all, were depicted in racist and sexist extremes, namely the scheming Jezebel; the buxom, headragged mammy; and the heavy laborer who toiled in the fields from sunup to sundown.
I had spent years in the University of Texas library immersed in American, Southern, African American, and women and gender studies listening for the voices of women that had been drowned out by all the noise created when slaveholders recorded their thoughts, emotions, and opinions about plantation life in their diaries, household journals, and letters to family and friends. Along the way, I amassed a rare collection of recipe books published by Black authors that date back to 1827, hoping to hear another side of the story. These books grounded me in a region and gave me a sense of self I only came to know through historic texts, a tough reality that surprises me to this day.
The turbulent stories of Black women working as household servants in Southern kitchens hurt me deeply. In my first book, The Jemima Code, I wrote that Mom left skid marks when she quit the South, and my parents made new, rich lives for themselves and my brother and me near the sands of the Pacific Ocean. My mother was a vegetarian, and vestiges of her upbringing in Louisiana and Texas occasionally appeared on our dinner table and in some of her genteel customs, but the scars of stereotyping and segregation that bruised her spirit were seldom mentioned. I longed to know more about Southern households and the Black women on which they depended, and once I did, I wanted to reclaim their lives as individuals — not mythical characters — from whom everyone can learn. Cookbooks made those women’s voices audible, and reading about their experiences added context about Southern living that my upbringing missed.
One of the first cooks to nurture my awakening was the “Turbaned Mistress of the Kentucky kitchen.” In 1904, Kentucky authors Minnie C. Fox, a white woman, and her brother John, a well-known novelist, honored the Turbaned Mistress - a term they coined to refer to Black kitchen workers generally — for her dignity, wisdom, and talent in The Blue Grass Cook Book. The first known cookbook to paint an honest picture of the South's culinary world at the start of the 20th century, Blue Grass features more than 300 recipes and a dozen photographs — not distortions — of African American cooks at work, including the now iconic Turbaned Mistress who appeared on the book’s inside cover.
The Blue Grass Cook Book became the cornerstone of my work. That image of the Turbaned Mistress inspired everything I wrote and said and did. Her slight smile beamed on my website, business cards, blog, and even a traveling exhibition for The Jemima Code. Because of her I reimagined the Black cook as a symbol of hope — not just survival — and I positioned her, the other Blue Grass characters, and Black cooks generally as wise servants who cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated themselves and other enslaved Americans, owned and operated businesses, nourished Civil Rights workers and more — all while nurturing our collective character and working outside of the home, usually in other women’s kitchens.
I have moved around a lot in my adult life, but dreams of a library where I could engage with cooks like the Turbaned Mistress followed me wherever I went. Not the makeshift shelves I assembled in a hallway in my first house in Los Angeles. Or the entertainment center in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where a few cookbooks shared space with a 36-inch television and assorted knickknacks. The library of my dreams featured floor-to-ceiling bookcases offset by an ornate fireplace in a dark, brooding room with soft lighting and a rolling ladder. It was a lovely place my authors could call home.
The fairy tale finally became reality in 2018, when my husband and I bought a 100-year-old rowhouse in Charles Village, Baltimore, where pocket doors, gaslights, original wood window shutters, and a fireplace mantel embellished with an etched and beveled mirror, scrollwork, and beautiful wood trim gracefully accented the parlor that became my library. (Even without the ladder, the space was a dream come true.)
Two years after we completed the renovation, identity theft robbed me of my precious library. We sold the rowhouse and moved with my broken heart back to Texas. But when all the boxes were unpacked and the books carefully placed on the etched shelves brought from Maryland, I had no trouble summoning my spiritual connections with “the ladies and a few gentlemen” — the name I gave to the authors years ago when I was trying to untangle my experiences in the food world from theirs.
Today, Edna Lewis’ lessons on country cooking make me a better practitioner, whether she is nurturing me through roasting fowl, or the careful process of making grape jelly. When we come together in my home library, her spirit asks me to visualize her hands as she folds, to lean into the steam as it rises from the pot so that I can smell the aroma of raw onions as they caramelize, to appreciate the emotional release that comes from kneading soft dough. She assures me that I can do it, whatever it is. She helps me reclaim things my mother knew, but suppressed. She encourages me to slow down.
And she isn’t the only one. This year, I found a way to celebrate other Southern women I love, amplifying their voices in my new book, When Southern Women Cook: History, Lore, and 300 Recipes From Every Corner of the American South, out this November. This patchwork quilt of recipes and essays published by America’s Test Kitchen reaches beyond the binary of black and white to tell the rich stories of Southern women’s cooking.
In the same way that my library conjures up feelings of history and home for me, these women, chefs, authors, and food historians show us their side of Southern food. From vignettes about the women who worked at Monticello, to stories that explain the importance of the women’s canning movement, or the misogyny on display in music lyrics featuring the Waffle House, the writing implores us to treasure our experiences, to cook with our souls, and to remember a truth I adapted from words written by author Shani Jay:
“A woman’s cookbook is powerful AF.”
Toni Tipton-Martin
Toni Tipton-Martin is an award-winning food and nutrition journalist who uses cultural heritage and cooking for social change. Editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country magazine, she is the winner of three James Beard Book Awards and the Julia Child Foundation Award. Her new book with America’s Test Kitchen, When Southern Women Cook: History, Lore, and 300 Recipes From Every Corner of the American South, will be released this fall.
Mary Inhea Kang is a South Korean American photographer based in Austin and New York City. She's driven by a desire to understand and document the identities we construct for ourselves and often she explores the tensions and limits between individualism and collectivism through her work. When approaching photos, she is inspired by her friend Shiyam Galyon’s quote, “I want to live in a world that feels moved by photos of non-white people at their best moments in life, rather than at their worst” while not ignoring the real issues that many marginalized communities face. Outside of work, she volunteers as a board member at Authority Collective.