BY TONI TIPTON-MARTIN
From The Jemima Code
Pioneering food editor, cookbook collector, and community activist Toni Tipton-Martin fills a crucial gap in culinary history with her beautiful, scholarly 2015 book The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. At last, the black cooks whose recipes have long fed America get their due respect.
When I first encountered The Picayune Creole Cook Book, I thought it masterfully illustrated the sentiments expressed by this young, eighteen-year-old poet living in Washington, D.C., in post–World War I America.
This popular catalogue remained in print through fourteen editions, many with the same frontispiece, a photographic illustration of an antebellum hearth kitchen and romanticized recipes that “your mother used, and her mother and her grandmother, and the grandmother caught [them] from the old-time ‘Mammy’ who could work all kinds of magic in that black-raftered kitchen of the long ago.”
The Picayune Creole Cook Book was created “to assist the good housewives of the present day and to preserve to future generations the many excellent and matchless recipes of the New Orleans cuisine by gathering up from the old Creole cooks and the old housekeepers the best of Creole cookery.” It presented an amalgamated cuisine, created when French chefs and the best cooks of Spain shared ideas that New World cooks adapted “to their needs and to the materials they had at hand,” for a result that was “beyond speech.”
The book perpetuated the stilted reasoning that she who owns the cook owns the recipes, yet simultaneously imparted a measure of visibility to ignored cooks. It exposed the frustration felt by a growing number of white employers who found it impossible to separate their contempt for black servants from their dependence upon them, and it forecast a coming practice by mainstream cookbook authors—one that opened a crack in what David M. Katzman described as “southern caste etiquette,” which dictated that blacks not appear to be in control. Ever.
In Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (1978), a pioneering study of domestic relationships, Katzman tells the story of a northern mistress, Antoinette Hervey, trying to follow a delicious cookie recipe as told by her servant, “big black Katherine.” Hervey recorded Katherine’s recipe in vernacular language that was hard to follow. Katherine’s mouth-watering treat “came from experience, not from any cooking manual . . . handed down from her mother or a close relative,” Katzman explained. “Creativity in cooking was part of a folk tradition shared by many black women. And cooking was part of an oral or practical tradition, not a written one. Rather than reflecting ignorance—the point of Hervey’s retelling the story—the anecdote [sic] revealed Katherine’s mastery of the kitchen arts. . . . But her Northern mistress had little understanding of this Southern folk system.”
No matter; the door opened.
Although Katherine possessed the knowledge of a specialist, Hervey and a generation of southern ladies set in place a harsh and false impression that misled the public: the black cook may have cooked excellently, but she was too ignorant to translate that experience into scientific formulas, much less into print.
While the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (1st ed., 1930) and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1st ed., 1896) offered wordy details and sometimes lengthy cooking instructions for inexperienced cooks, southern cookbook authors representing the plantation style asserted their authority racially—by repeatedly resorting to condescending language and disparaging images when mentioning black women, whom previous designers had simply ignored.
Everywhere I looked—Nathalie Scott’s composite cook, Mandy; Mary Moore Bremer’s “negro woman”; the “colored cooks” described by Harriet Ross Colquitt; and the bandana-headed women whose faces graced the covers of manufacturers’ recipe pamphlets and brochures—mid-twentieth-century mainstream cookbook authors in both the North and the South froze black food workers in trophy-like portraits of antebellum characters: the fruit vendor, the potato man, the groundnut vendor, and the honey man. In commentary that both praised and ridiculed the cook, these authors inadvertently introduced us to black cooks who understood the nuances of regional cooking.
As late as 1941, respected writers such as Marion Flexner exaggerated their “scientific approach to cooking” by juxtaposing illustrations of elegant plantation scenes against cabin hearth cooking done by black women in head rags. And she was far from the only one. The Southern Cookbook: 322 Old Dixie Recipes (1939), compiled by Lillie S. Lustig, S. Claire Sondheim, and Sarah Rensel, has become a perennial favorite with Internet booksellers on eBay. It mingles classic southern recipes, demoralizing etchings of slaves at work, vernacular language, and lyrics from spirituals and hymns.
In their lavishly illustrated 200 Years of Charleston Cooking (1931), Blanche S. Rhett and Lettie Gay applaud black cooks for their “famed” regional dishes. Crab Soup, Shrimp and Hominy (Grits), Fish Soufflé, Stuffed Crabs and Mushrooms, Fried Chicken with Corn Cakes, and Sweet Potato Croquettes are attributed to a butler named William Deas, “one of the great cooks of the world.” Sally Washington, whose “cooking was of a kind to make one speculate as to whether she was a genius in her own right or whether Charleston was gifted by the gods,” is credited for her recipe for Red Rice.
Harriet Ross Colquitt made her confused prejudices known through plantation sketches laced with bitter complaints about the near impossibility of procuring recipes for her Savannah Cook Book: A Collection of Old Fashioned Receipts from Colonial Kitchens (1933).
We have had so many request for receipts for rice dishes, and for shrimp and crab concoctions which are peculiar to our locality, that I have concentrated on those indigenous to our soil, as it were, begging them from housekeepers, and trying to tack our elusive cooks down to some definite idea of what goes into the making of the good dishes they turn out. Getting directions from colored cooks is rather like trying to write down the music to the spirituals which they sing—for all good old-timers . . . cook “by ear” and it is hard to bring them down to earth when they begin to improvise.
Eleanor Ott’s hyperbolic recipe collection, Plantation Cookery of Old Louisiana, boasts wistful reminiscences of the charm of antebellum cuisine and wows readers with the vast number of servants on her grandmother’s “culinary plant.” At the same time, she revered the cooks for their “Intelligence, Industry, and Art.” Kitty Mammy, the plantation doctor and nurse who supervised the herb garden, and Becky Mammy, the high priestess of the milk house, both were honored simply: “Genius, sheer, breathtaking Genius.”
A few African American authors manage to self-publish remarkable recipe collections of their own between World War I and the dawning of the civil rights movement. Their collections stand in the gap for the mammy, the Cream of Wheat Man, and the procession of colored maids in Hollywood films. But more than that, these writers can be seen as predecessors of modern celebrity chefs who press through publishing favoritism and prejudice, boost spirits, and cheer on the next generation, all while championing middle-class American cooking.
The delicacies and grace rendered by Eliza’s Cook Book: Favorite Recipes Compiled by Negro Culinary Art Club of Los Angeles, Lena Richard’s wise entrepreneurship, Lucille Bishop Smith’s empowering spirit, and Freda DeKnight’s global kitchen existed in the shadows of pervasive and perverse debasements. These authors understood the work of the kitchen, and they used that knowledge to untether their foodways from distorted representations.
In the same way, Idella Parker stared down jocular characterizations of domestic servitude and ushered in an era of culinary liberation with her account of life in the household of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Though little was written elsewhere to accurately credit black cooks as experts, this former domestic, teacher, and cook accepts her life of service as the renowned author’s “Perfect Maid,” without drowning in that murky dishwater. Her memoir does not contain recipes in the traditional sense, and it wasn’t published until fifty years after Rawlings wrote Cross Creek Cookery, a book of classic southern dishes. Parker does, however, present an insightful look into the complex relations between a black cook and her white employer. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings called me ‘the perfect maid’ in her book Cross Creek,” Parker writes in the preface to Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ Perfect Maid. “I am not perfect and neither was Mrs. Rawlings, and this book will make that clear to anyone who reads it.”
As the story of their life together unfolds, Parker provides a believable, poised, and fair account of how it felt to be underpaid and over-worked. Naturally, she was frustrated. After months spent together in the kitchen testing recipes for Cross Creek Cookery, including many that Parker claimed were hers, such as the chocolate pie, Rawlings credits her on just three. Still, Parker’s courage accomplishes something unique and wonderful: it draws everyone into the kitchen, inviting folks to cook for one another and to persevere through awkward race conversations.
This truth would have been a sight for the sore eyes of Cuney’s domestics and the authors on the following pages, who invented regional, cultural, and ethnic specialties when they left their own kitchens to manage someone else’s.