Eventually, Tipton-Martin built an exhibit that toured museums and historic sites. She started gathering those books, diving into book auctions, and haunting book stores. Her research led to years of digging in archives and libraries, where she discovered cookbooks written by black cooks as early as 1827. The project that would come to dominate her life. Digital media created an opportunity for my voice to be heard.” I was purely looking for my grandmother on the pages of Southern food history. “I had no desire to write in the first person or to make this part of my story. “I took to the internet kicking and screaming,” she says today. Around 2008, at the annual Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi, Tipton-Martin arrived with sheets of stickers of Aunt Jemima’s red bandana, adhering them to people’s name tags while she talked about her new blog, The Jemima Code Project, where she was gathering the stories of African American cooks. She wasn’t so much disturbed by the image grinning from boxes of pancake mix and bottles of syrup as she was by what Aunt Jemima represented-the too-easy stereotype of enslaved black cooks that had overshadowed a long history of talented black chefs, cooks, caterers, and cookbook authors. “You don’t eat an elephant all at once.”īoth books can trace their beginnings back by more than a decade, to when Tipton-Martin was becoming troubled by a feeling that the image of Aunt Jemima wasn’t the real story of African American contributions to the nation’s culinary traditions. “The material was so complex that I needed to ease it out a little at a time,” Tipton-Martin says. Lushly photographed and richly researched, Jubilee builds on Jemima Code ’s foundation by highlighting more than one hundred recipes that capture the complex roots of African American cooking, from celebrations and parties to everyday family suppers. Following on her award-winning book, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African Am erican Cookbook s, which documented rare and little-known books by African American chefs, Tipton-Martin is this fall releasing Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African-American Cooking.
Her real work, though, has been a different kind of restoration.
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