Award-winning historian and author of 'The Jemima Code' and 'Jubilee' joins Kristen to talk about winning the Julia Child Award, and what's next.
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Kristen Miglore (voiceover): Hi, I'm Kristen Miglore, a lifelong genius hunter. For almost a decade, I've been unearthing the recipes that have changed the way we cook. Now on The Genius Recipe Tapes, we go behind the scenes with the geniuses themselves, and we get to hear from you. This week. I'm talking with Toni Tipton-Martin, the award-winning historian and author of The Jemima Code and Jubilee. Both books draw from her collection of more than 400 historic African-American cookbooks. You might remember that we shared Toni's Louisiana Barbecued hrimp from Jubilee last year, in Genius Recipes. That recipe is just one extraordinarily delicious example of the work that Toni has spent decades of her career. Toni researches the full spectrum of African-American cooking and finds unsung recipes and techniques that often fall outside the well-known soul food cannon and share their stories with dignity and respect.
Toni first fell in love with that Genius shrimp, which is not barbecued, but quickly simmered in a buttery, spicy Creole pan sauce on her family vacations on the Gulf Coast of Texas. She then compared and tested recipes across the cookbooks in her collection as she worked on Jubilee. Her favorite version, ultimately based on one from the model chef and restaurant, B. Smith, who wrote three cookbooks, built a restaurant empire and sadly passed away not long after we first featured the recipe that she inspired.
Today, Toni is here to talk about how her work continues with the recent announcement of her winning the Julia Child Award. The award is given annually since 2015 to someone who has made a profound and significant difference in the way that America cooks, eats, and drinks. And Juneteenth, the holiday honoring the end of slavery in the United States, is coming up and making this an especially poignant moment to reflect on all of the good that Toni has done and will continue to do. While also acknowledging that this is only the latest development in a long career of using accurate role models to inspire the next generation. At the end of the episode, we'll hear more from our listeners about how they're planning to celebrate Juneteenth this year. But for now, let's hear more from Toni.
For any listeners who aren't familiar with the recipe yet, can you share why the Louisiana Barbecue Shrimp from Jubilee is one of your favorites from the book and the story behind finding and developing it for the version you shared in Jubilee?
Toni Tipton-Martin: It is effortless, and it's delicious. It's an adaptation. So it helps us understand the idea that you can take a recipe and make it your own because it's a version of basically just having an excellent garlic shrimp or a scampi recipe. But in Louisiana, they do different things to make the sauce, the pan sauce. And so, there are even recipes that call for beer, but this recipe takes advantage of the African-American penchant for spicy food. It's flavorful, full of garlic, and it's got this great fire that sneaks up on you. But you can adjust that; people don't have to make it as hot as I make it or even as the other chefs did before me. The work that I do in recognizing the professional qualities of African-American cooking. What I love is that there's a technique involved in making this dish. While it's straightforward and it can look like you're just sauteing shrimp, the way of making a silky french styled sauce that culturally we might have just called gravy, which diminished the technique associated with making the dish. This recipe amplifies that. It helps you understand making a reduction sauce, the classic reduction sauce, and this idea of swirling the butter into the dish to allow the liquids to emulsify. All of that just shows the knowledge. So the recipe hits all kinds of notes. It shows professionalism; it’s delicious. My family loves it on Christmas, New Year's Eve. We often make it and stand around the stove dipping french bread into the cast iron skillet before we can even get it into the bowls. So it's a favorite for us too.
Kristen: The story in Jubilee, with your beautiful storytelling and history, initially drew me to the shrimp recipe. Then I made it, and I was just stunned at how quickly you could get so much flavor in no more than 10 minutes of cooking. But because you've gathered all these different spices and seasonings, they instantly formed this incredible, magical sauce for sure.
Toni: I often think about fish and shellfish in terms of their delicacy and not wanting to overpower them with heavy seasoning. So those coming to this dish for the first time might be surprised and think that this will overtake the shrimp instead of complimenting it. But that's not true. There are independent flavors there, but they're also the collective is it makes a beautiful dish. And I think that again is what is so attractive to me about this particular recipe is; it isn't that it's so much a surprise in the African-American community. Or maybe even in the food world, this style of cooking. Seeing both cooking styles coexist in the same place is a surprise. So we know about scampi and reduction sauces, and we know about using Germany to thicken a sauce and not have to make a traditional roux gravy. But we don't think about that in association with African-American food. And I think that is why Jubilee has had the staying power. I took the existing recipes and revealed the techniques behind them, which was a surprise factor for so many readers.
Kristen: Could you just talk a little bit more about that, about your process of working on The Jemima Code and Jubilee and the things that you were trying to show in working on those books, and also maybe some things that you discovered yourself along the way.
Toni: I started The Jemima Code and Jubilee project as a self-education project, and maybe even as an expression of self-care to tell you the truth. And this week earning the Julia Child award is particularly reflective of that experience because I've been at this for a very long time. I wanted to draw attention to a different side of African-American food culture. And I was trying to find my way in the food industry. I was marginalized or rejected because my message wasn't the same as everybody else. No one should minimize the idea that survival cooking is an essential aspect of African-American foodways. But with any swinging of the pendulum, you have to swing to the other end. And at the other end, there's the food of the culture that I experienced. As a girl brought up on the beach in southern California, my Black experience wasn't any less Black than anybody else is. It wasn't limited to the foods of the South and this poverty survival message. I wanted to tell a broader story. I quickly realized from the obstacles that I encountered that if I were going to tell this story, I would have to rely on my journalism skills to produce an evidence-based message. It's going to require sourcing and citations in a way that perhaps no other food culture story needed to be legitimized. I went above and beyond to find that proof, and the cookbooks provided me the evidence. So I wound up with a collection of well over 400 black cookbooks that date back to 1827. and from those, I was able to identify a style of cooking associated with affluence and people who worked in the food profession and that food is also African-American and it is theirs.
Kristen: I've seen that you have called yourself a reluctant collector. Do you still feel that way? And why is that?
Toni: I might even be more reluctant now because now I understand the value of these books, and I'm concerned about their care. So people have started sending and gifting me with books because they know that I'm a good caretaker for them. I love them, and I want them to all be together, almost like a family. But my concern is that I don't have the facility to store them properly, and I want them archived for the best preservation. A few of the texts are pretty fragile, and the paper is starting to give. I have them stored in a safe place, but I don't want them around because of their value. So all of that makes is making me a little bit more nervous about them. The more I talk about my books and include the books in my storytelling, the auction prices of the books are driving up. For example, the Abby Fisher Book from 1881 sold for $3,000 fifteen years ago. The last time the book sold, a year and a half ago, was for $15,000. It's exceedingly rare, and many of those early books are. So I'm a reluctant collector.
In pursuit of authentic voices, I became a collector of the real people telling a different story. I didn't know that we're going to have a different story to tell until I had all of the books in front of me. I was visiting the public library, trying to find resources to find these voices that I was looking for. So I would research old photos, listened to tapes of the slave narratives, and looked for cookbooks, but they were in special collection archives all around the country. One book would be in Washington DC, and another one would be in Birmingham. I could not access them, and this effort to see the books in person turned into a collecting project.
Kristen: I understand the weight and responsibility of caring for many important, historical, or rare books. But I can't imagine the books being in better hands until you find a place to archive them.
Toni: Thank you. That is very kind. And I think many people have felt that way because I've been so public in my pursuit of them. When I was looking for the Abby Fisher book, I jokingly went on social media and said that this book would be available at auction. And that I was digging around in my old purses and my husband's pants pockets, looking for quarters and pennies so that I could go to the auction. And I was just making a social media post. The next thing I know, my followers and friends were pushing me to start a GoFundMe. As a journalist, I felt like that was such an icky thing to do. I was not fundraising for important family or personal needs, so it felt carpetbagger for me to go looking for money for this book. But my followers insisted, so I did it. And we raised $10,000 in 10 days! So we went to auction.
Kristen: It is a personal collection, but it is a community collection as well, and you're the keeper of it for now.
Toni: That's a sweet sentiment. That is true because people are sending me books that I would never have access to. I cannot get small community books or church cookbooks, but now people send me those things. So I just got a note following the Julia award announcement from somebody who is a book dealer and sells these things. But she's going to send me a book about Maryland, and hopefully, it will become a feature in the new TV show that we're planning.
Kristen: Would you mind sharing with that tv show will be?
Toni: We are prepping a television show with a combination travel log and cooking show centered in the library and the collection. We will explore some of my favorite books. It'll give viewers a chance to see inside of them in ways that they haven't been able to see in the way that I couldn't see them. I want people to have that same experience in falling in love with these authors and their messages and the values they left behind. We will travel to regions according to the books and The Jemima Code. We will explore the people and history of each region through conversations and meals with the people of the area.
Kristen: So this show will come out in the fall, correct
Toni: That is probably a year away because we haven't started filming for that yet. One of the things that have changed at Cook's Country is replacing one of the recipes with a stunning portrait of a cook. So the back page of our magazine used to have a spectacularly photographed portrait of a desert. Our photographer could make pudding look sexy and beautiful and but he has the same eye for people, and we didn't have a space for that because of our dedication to recipe development. We hope that readers don't miss that one recipe and that we're giving them a lot more and seeing the beautiful smile of the cook behind the recipes we love because that's what's important to me. Recipes do not make themselves; there is always a cook there. And we have marginalized cooks of almost every kind. Women are part of that marginalized group. When we think about chefs, we often revert to thinking that means men. And so my work has just been designed to bring more equity and inclusion for initially for African-Americans, but now for other invisible cooks at Cook's Country and then in my nonprofit work that will focus on women.
Kristen (voiceover): Hey, it's Kristen. If you enjoy this chat with Toni as much as I did, head to The Genius Recipe Tapes and hit subscribe so you won't miss out on other conversations like this one. In the second half of the episode, Toni tells us about her plans for the $50,000 grant that she just received from the Julia Child Foundation.
Kristen: by your nonprofit work. Do you mean the same nonprofit that's going to be receiving the grant?
Toni: That is my nonprofit. In 2008, I founded a 501c3 non-profit organization about the time I was doing this collecting, and at the time, I envisioned the authors and a book like the Jemima Code as a workbook. And we would deliver the classes in a historic house where women primarily could come together and cook together the way that we often do and share recipes and tell stories and help one another heal and grow. So I had a couple of opportunities to get my hands on historic houses in Austin, Texas that fell through. In the meantime, while I was unable to achieve that part of the goal, the landmark preservation part, I directed my mentor energy towards marginalized, underserved families. So the organization initially during the Obama years focused on Children with a cooking school program held after school.
Then it made a pivot, and it focused on high school kids. And I took a group of high schoolers to New York City, and they cooked at the Beard House as part of an exhibit of The Jemima Code. That was incredible for them. We created a program called the Children's Picnic, a free program to get kids and their families to understand how delicious healthy food could be. It might have meant just having some water with a sprig of lemon and some strawberries sliced in it to help them understand that you didn't have to drink those brightly colored red and blue drinks that are bombarding them in their convenience store. And then finally we reached the young adults through Seoul summit and so some. It was an opportunity before social media for young up-and-coming food professionals to be in the presence of icons. And so I brought everybody who was anybody at the time in the food world into Austin so that young people could be in their company and hear them deliver their speeches.
So the vision for the non-profit will be to combine all of those efforts and direct them towards young women as food writers because I have endured a lot to achieve what I have. I hope that a pool of highly acclaimed women writers will provide mentorship to the up-and-coming generation and help them navigate the system in ways that we didn't have help. It’s a big ambition, but the Julia Child Award and America's Test Kitchen connection tie all of my work together in a nice bow. It has seemed disparate, I think to most people, you learn about my book collection, or you hear me talking about being a magazine editor, but this is the first time that I think people will get a chance to understand the end purpose of my project!
Kristen: How would you frame that end purpose of all of your projects for our listeners?
Toni: The end purpose is to use accurate role models to inspire the next generation so that they can be economically independent. But it's also designed to increase our tolerance of one another and break down stereotypes to have healthier communities. And when I say healthy communities, I have intentionally chosen those words. Not only to mean healthy in your body or your mind but well as a community. How do we sustain our world, in our neighborhoods, in our human society? By being more tolerant of our differences. A vision I’ve held for years and decades is coming to fruition, hopefully. We could stop seeing the Mammy character representing all black women; we could begin to see each African-American woman as an individual with her own set of characteristics and values. Then we might apply that same approach to every individual we meet and not lump them into a biased, prejudiced category and then save our communities. And that's been the vision all along: using real people, not stereotypes, to protect our humanity.
Kristen: That all makes so much sense.
Toni: We're heading into the time for Juneteenth, and this is an expression of freedom. My freedom and everyone else's freedom. The name Jubilee is about freedom and liberation. We are all free. When I say that in my work, I mean it. And that is what Juneteenth is all about. It is a celebration of a group of people who were so significantly oppressed and unable to develop generational wealth and benefit from the fruits of their labor and intellectual property. In some small way, my work can restore that intellectual property if entities that support me and what I'm trying to accomplish can do so as a type of reparations. I've taken to calling the support I receive culinary reparations because we can't give those people back their lives, the resources taken from them. But we can give them back their dignity by attributing recipes to them that belonged to them. We learn what a person contributed to American society while also getting a recipe for great pancakes.
Kristen: Here are some of our listeners to tell us how they'll be celebrating Juneteenth this year.
Listener Christine Ng: Hi, Christina Ng from Berry Good Food Foundation, out in sunny San Diego, California. This year, we are hosting a Carolina Gold Rice and Sea Island Red Peas Cook-off to honor Juneteenth. The competitors include chefs, up-and-coming culinary students, and some of our favorite food friends. And we're going to challenge everybody to show homage to the ingredients in a fun, delicious way. We can't wait to get it on.
Listener Meiko Temple: Meiko Temple here, of Meiko and The Dish dot com. And let’s talk Juneteenth! I am a big advocate of Juneteenth. For the past two years, I have brought together Black content creators in a collaboration I like to call The Juneteenth Cookout. It is a virtual menu of recipes inspired by the African diaspora. It’s one of the ways we have continued to celebrate Juneteenth despite the pandemic. On a personal note, I plan to have a small celebration at home. My mom just moved into the same state as me, so I get to celebrate with her, my stepdad, and a small group of friends. We will have a full Juneteenth spread, quipped with red food like hot wings and chow chow, barbecue chicken. And of course, the cups will be filled with red drinks–you can count on that! I am just excited this year; I can have people with me celebrating a momentous time in our history.
Kristen: (voiceover): Thanks for listening. And my thanks to Toni Tipton Martin, award-winning author of the Jemima Code, and Jubilee, Editor-in-Chief of Cook's Country magazine, and the recipient of the Julia Child Award this year. Our show was put together by Coral Lee, with support from Emily Hanhan. If you have a Genius Recipe to share, especially from marginalized communities and historically overlooked cooks who have been traditionally overlooked, I would always love to hear from you at genius@food52.com. And if you like The Genius Recipe Tapes, take a second to rate and review, or subscribe if you haven't already. All of it helps. Talk to you soon.