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Nicole A. Taylor’s Watermelon & Red Birds: A Cookbook for Juneteenth and Black Celebrations will set you free—free from any set ideas and misconceptions that you may have about traditional African American ingredients, culinary techniques, and food traditions, and their place in holiday celebrations.
Taylor’s is the first cookbook wholly dedicated to Juneteenth that’s been released by a major commercial publisher. For most of book publishing’s history, a perceived lack of commercial appeal for Black culinary art has severely limited opportunities for Black cookbook authors, placing an enormous pressure on a select few authors to offer comprehensive, singular views of their cuisines. Watermelon & Red Birds throws this idea out the window, showing that the holiday is much more than a static menu of traditional dishes.
As Taylor, a longtime journalist and the author of The Up South Cookbook and The Last O.G. Cookbook writes, this book is “meant to be a bridge between those traditional dishes of African American celebration and those flavors that I have come to know and appreciate as my culinary horizons have broadened.” Taylor’s engaging prose fuels a narrative that is part memoir, part history lesson, and part edible exploration of global flavors. This culminates in a beautifully photographed and chronicled celebration of a Texas-based holiday that has been celebrated for more than 150 years and has recently become known nationally as the “Black Independence Day.”
One of the most foundational elements of the Juneteenth table is a variety of red-colored foods. Red symbolizes the blood shed by Africans and their descendants through the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the early Juneteenth celebrations featured an array of summertime foods associated with the American South like fried chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, and peach cobbler. Over time, a “Juneteenth Trinity” took shape and hosts knew that an authentic holiday meal had to include barbecue (made red by smoking and slathering on a tomato-based barbecue sauce), a red drink (Big Red is the brand of choice for many Texans), and ripe slices of watermelon.
Barbecue became a key component of this trinity in the decades after slavery was legalized in Texas in 1836. Slaveholding Southerners flocked to the eastern part of the state in search of fertile land for enslaved African Americans to cultivate. As in other parts of the American South, enslaved African Americans were the primary cooks when barbecues happened. Whole carcasses of pigs and sheep, or quartered cows, were the featured items in the early days, and by the turn of the 20th century, barbecue cooks shifted to cooking smaller cuts of meat like brisket, chicken, pork spareribs, and sausages. Taylor includes recipes for those standards and expands the barbecue menu with non-red-colored items like caraway butter trout and dry-rubbed fancy mushrooms. Taylor adds some acidic rhubarb to breathe new life into the traditional tangy, tomato-based barbecue sauce.
Fittingly, red drinks also get a special and wholesome spotlight in the book. West Africa is home to a species of hibiscus, and the plant’s flower petals are used to make a variety of beverages throughout the region. Kola nuts, also native to that part of the world, were used for the same purpose. During the Atlantic slave trade era, hibiscus plants were brought to the Americas and enslaved Africans began making hibiscus and kola nut drinks that gave them a taste of home while adapting to a new environment. The most well-known of these drinks is sorrel—a spiced hibiscus drink which is beloved throughout the Caribbean. Taylor provides a recipe for an unsweetened hibiscus tea and strawberry lemonade, the latter being a staple at various African American social gatherings since the 19th century. She even puts a savory spin on the red-colored theme with a recipe for a miso Bloody Mary.
Finally, there’s watermelon, another West African native that made its way to the Americas. It’s hard to beat a fresh slice of ripe watermelon, but Taylor provides other tempting options, like grilled watermelon kebabs with citrus verbena salt. This playful recipe is tempered with a headnote describing how, for centuries, racist whites have used watermelon to create and proliferate extremely negative stereotypes about African Americans. You’ll be grateful that Taylor included this recipe—the interplay of flavors and textures is marvelous. She furthers the West African connection in this recipe by adding benne seeds for some added crunch.
Taking liberties like these taps into the spirit of Taylor’s enthusiastic declaration of Black culinary independence. “This book is not an attempt to capture the tastes and recipes of that 1866 Juneteenth celebration,” she writes. “This is a testament to where we are now. It’s an attempt to synthesize all the places we’ve been, all the people we have come from, all the people we have become, and all the culinary ideas we have embraced.”
A proper Juneteenth cookbook is seasoned with some political and social commentary. After all, it has been a long political journey to see the holiday recognized on a national level. Civil rights activists in Texas undertook a sustained, multiyear lobbying effort to make Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980, but it wasn’t until 2021 that the U.S. Senate unanimously passed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In the U.S. House of Representatives, 14 representatives—all Republicans—voted against it. Ultimately, Juneteenth became a federal holiday in June 2021.
Taylor sets this political tone early on in the book by wryly noting that “African Americans crave locally harvested, coast-to-coast, USDA Prime liberty, in all its bitter sweetness.” Yes, full acceptance and freedom remain elusive to Black people living in the U.S., but we endeavor. As Taylor demonstrates, culinary art is just one of several fields where Black excellence thrives and expands. Ultimately, Watermelon & Red Birds is both a nod to ancestral tastes as well as an open-ended invitation to a table that one can set on one’s own terms. Taylor emphasizes that African Americans are free to cook what they want, when they want, and how they want it. That’s the kind of liberation that’s worth savoring.
