When I first reached for Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, I’d anticipated a big Black family reunion. I expected vibrant hues, explosive images, splashy treatments for effusive and over-the-top essays. I expected Black faces enjoying their food. With a title that evoked elation, I expected nothing short of fireworks.
Thumbing through the brand-new book on a first pass, that’s not what I got. The images were deadpan still lifes: jars of pickled shrimp on a wood cutting board, cups of sorrel on a tray, an overhead shot of buttermilk biscuits on parchment, occasional Black hands at work washing collards, pouring punch. The recipes, for okra salad, jambalaya, and oven-baked ribs, seemed simple and conventional. The color scheme was muted with rich woods, deep greens, and patinated silvers. How could this treatise on 200 years of Black foodways published in the year 2019 feel so rigid, so cold...so quiet?
Over the past two years alone, I’ve seen Black cooks and chefs make crucial strides in redefining how soul food looks and feels. In June, social media star Lazarus Lynch came out with his first cookbook, Son of a Southern Chef, a paperback of extra voice-y quips and kaleidoscopic colors with trippy images showing his sense of style as much as his imaginative cooking. In 2018, Jerrelle Guy published Black Girl Baking, chock-full of multitiered cakes, technicolor crackers laced with alternative flours and colorful spices, and most important, pictures of Black people enjoying the fruits of their baking. And they’re not alone. Todd Richards, JJ Johnson and Alexander Smalls, Carla Hall, and Jerome Grant have all produced bodies of work that advocated for new ideals of Black cooking, celebrated the sheer skill and prosperity of Black cooks, and critiqued ill-conceived notions and stereotypes surrounding Black cuisine. Each of these books offered a personality-driven focus on particular Black cooks while celebrating the joy of Black identity and community in ways that feel rich, vibrant, and forward-thinking. Surely, I thought, the same abundance of elation would permeate Jubilee, a highly curated and far-reaching collection of Black culinary advancements.
Knowing Tipton-Martin as a scholar, I had some idea of what to expect. Her extensive résumé as a historian, a documentarian, and food journalist would seem to forecast an experience more in line with a well-researched textbook than an aspirational social media feed. And if precedent is any indication, then her groundbreaking (and award-winning) debut cookbook, The Jemima Code, published in 2015, shows her bookish tendencies. A total tour de force, it pulls from more than 150 cookbooks to tell the 200-year story of Black culinary arts, showcasing the diverse and rich legacy of Black cooks while debunking the stereotypes that were wrongly placed upon them. As a document, it did far more than give home cooks recipes to add to their repertoire; it gave agency to generations of chefs whose names and contributions had previously been left out of the discussion of American cuisine.
In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin picks up where she left off, taking the recipes that showed up most often in her research to point to a diverse Black culinary canon that’s existed all along. Here, she aims to speak to the full Black experience, not just the ingenious recipes synonymous with survival and soul, but also those that developed out of a middle- and upper-class experience. “It honors cooking with intentionality and skill,” Tipton-Martin writes in the introduction, “for purpose and with pleasure.”
In each recipe, she distills the lessons and techniques of the individuals who have shaped a dish over time, combining them, remixing them, and in the end, making them her own, while always paying homage to her sources. A decadent gingerbread waffles and cream pulls from Abby Fisher’s version, documented in her 1881 cookbook What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, as well as from Carole and Norma Jean Darden’s, published nearly a century later in Spoonbread & Strawberry Wine. That pickled shrimp is informed as much by Daisy Redman (Four Great Southern Cooks, 1982) as Mashama Bailey of The Grey in Savannah. For a Creole fried chicken, Tipton-Martin looked to Leah Chase, Queen Ida Guillory, and Austin Leslie but ultimately went with a version from Lena Richard dated 1939.
As I flipped through the 300-plus pages, seeing these names in conversation across time and space, I realized that on first glance I’d missed what a wild party Jubilee actually is. This wasn’t one person’s fête, but a collaborative vision. A place where Katharin Bell and her 1927 recipe for spoonbread can coexist with pop star Kelis’s recipe for Caribbean roast pork. A place where the previously unnamed get the same attention as today’s biggest celebrity chefs. A place where splashy decorations come second to making room for all who show up. It’s the kind of party where the door is wide open, everyone’s name is on the list, and there’s enough good food to go round.
And what could be more joyous than that?
Get the recipe:
Buy It: Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, $32 on Amazon
All products featured on Bonappetit.com are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.