For centuries, we've been force-fed myths about the African-American culinary experience—distorted realities describing African-American cuisine as unsophisticated, or the supposed limited capabilities of black cooks. To begin to unravel these myths and re-write the script takes thorough research, which is exactly what award-winning author Toni Tipton-Martin resolved to do with her monumental book, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cooks. 

For Martin, the skewed perception of African-American cooking is a symptom of a system of oppression she calls the Jemima code. "Historically, the Jemima code was an arrangement of words and images synchronized to classify the character and life's work of our nation's black cooks as insignificant," she writes. These falsehoods fueled commercial images like "Aunt Jemima" and "Uncle Ben," which projected to whites an easily digestible stereotype of African Americans as "natural-born" cooks and servants, rather than culinary artists. The cumulative effect of these misconceptions is that it has long been easy for whites to leave African Americans out of culinary conversations, even if they are a key players in shaping the legacy of America's food. 

Martin tired of the continued slights towards African Americans, especially since none of the myths squared with her personal experience. She grew up in the black, middle-class neighborhood of Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles, California. Though her family had Southern roots, and soul-food dishes graced her family table, she grew up eating a wide variety of foods. In 1985, Martin got a job as a food writer at the Los Angeles Times and worked under the tutelage of Ruth Reichl. Martin was exposed to a cornucopia of food cultures and their cookbooks, but she rarely saw anything reflecting her own culinary tradition. She wondered aloud, "Where are the black cooks?"

To answer that question, she began collecting cookbooks authored by African Americans. The earliest published book in her collection is a servants' guide written by Robert Roberts in 1827. As her food journalism career flourished—in 1991, she became the food editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the first African American to have that position at a major daily newspaper)—her cookbook collection continued to expand. Now, after more than 30 years of research and 300 cookbooks later, Martin felt the time was right to set the record straight on African-American cooks and cuisines.

Bear in mind, The Jemima Code is not a cookbook—it's a beautifully photographed, annotated bibliography that highlights 160 of the books in Martin's extensive collection. With thorough research of cookbooks published from the 1800s to the early 2000s, Martin serves up a more complex view of African-American gastronomy through the words of enslaved cooks, domestic servants, private cooks, restaurant cooks and proprietors, caterers, culinary instructors, and entertainers.

"African Americans have been treated as invisible, non-contributors to many culinary conversations, especially those about Southern food," Martin explains. Thanks to The Jemima Code, Martin makes plain what was previously hidden while also dispelling those enduring and painful untruths. She writes, "I know that we can not take back 300 years of harsh words and pictures, but I do believe it is possible to undo some of the damage just by looking at the vast diversity of talents and abilities displayed by African-American food professionals through the cookbooks they left behind. And thereby seeing ourselves."

I asked Martin to do the highly unfair task of picking five cookbooks out of her impressive collection that were real game-changers in terms of how we should think about African-American cooks and cuisine—books that introduce a wide variety of cuisines beyond just soul food. Below, we meet African-American women who are entrepreneurs, using their culinary knowledge and skills to power their creative businesses. We also meet trailblazers who shed light on the culinary connections between West Africa and the Americas. Most importantly, each of these extraordinary women shows us different ways to shatter the Jemima code.

Author: Melinda Russell
Published: 1866

Why it's influential: "Malinda Russell's cookbook presents the first opportunity for us to think of black women as hard-working, single mothers. Russell was a mother, cook, and pastry shop owner. We've always had women who had to work really hard while getting abused and mistreated at work. Still, they found courage within themselves and relied on support from their community in order to survive. Russell's cookbook is a testament to the dedication she had for her family because her profession was the only way that they would make it. We learn from the brief biography provided that Russell authored this cookbook in order to raise money to care for her handicapped child.

Russell managed to achieve a level of creativity thanks to a blending of technical cooking skills passed down from her West Africa with European techniques. Russell's cookbook is noteworthy because it helped shaped notions of hospitality for her time. [But] it is also bold: She informs her reader that she's been trained, which speaks to her proficiency, her ability to master her environment, her organizational knowledge, and her technical skills. At the same time, she shows that her culinary skills were transferable from another experienced cook, not because of innate ability [due to her] African American [ancestry]." 

Author: Helen T. Mahammitt
Published: 1939 

Why it's influential: "Mahammit represents the African-American entrepreneur.  At the time her cookbook is published, she had already run a culinary school and a successful catering business for three decades. As I wrote in my book, 'she wants to fill the world with wonderful cooks and successful entrepreneurs.' In other words, she's trying to create more culinary workers who know the latest trends in cooking. She makes the latest scientific thinking about cooking more accessible to her readers. The way that the cookbook is written and organized shows that Mahammit taught the culinary arts just as any specialist would teach any other discipline. For example, she's very calculated in the construction of her method.  The cookbook has four different parts so that a cook can plug into the cookbook at different places based upon one's skill level. There's a section for novice cooks, another for advanced cooks (the recipes require more technique), a section on domestic service, and a final section on catering.

This book is influential because it's one of the earliest examples of an African American cookbook author translating the progression of culinary knowledge from the basics to the advanced. She's telling her readers that despite the pervading belief that African Americans were born cooks who didn't need any training, knowledge matters and education is important.  All the while, she's given her readers some business lessons borne from her extensive experience. By the end of the book, the reader is fully-prepared to be a caterer on their own."

Author: Lena Richard
Published: 1939 

Why it's influential: "Lena Richard showed what I call 'a broader category of community.' Even though African Americans have been associated with Creole cuisine, Lena Richard was the first African American to outright author her own cookbook on this popular cuisine. She brought to the forefront that Creole food and southern food are two different things. That last point seems so obvious now, but there needed to be that first one to show that African Americans are versatile cooks.

Speaking of versatility, Richard was a very talented business woman. She ran a catering business, was the head chef at different restaurants in New York and Virginia, ran a mail order food business for a soup mix, and ran a cooking school and operated a restaurant in New Orleans. Oh, and by the way, she self-published her cook book. She was more than willing to share her business experience with her students. Most importantly, well before Julia Child, Richard hosted a weekly cooking show on local television in New Orleans. Here, you have a black woman confidently showing her culinary skill before a diverse viewing audience. This was truly unprecedented for her time."

Author: Freda De Knight
Published: 1948

Why it's influential: "This is probably my favorite book out of the entire collection. I feel that I have a professional relationship with De Knight because she represents the journalists who used their columns in magazines and newspapers to keep home cooks up on the latest food trends. Like De Knight, I had a middle class upbringing, and I also became the first African American woman to be the food editor of a major daily newspaper—The Cleveland Plain Dealer. I love De Knight because she gave us permission to celebrate the wide diversity of what African Americans cooked and ate. Prior to her work, people would not accept that African Americans enjoyed preparing Chinese, French, Italian and other ethnic dishes. Their thinking was 'You don't really own that because that's white food.'

Without De Knight's work, we'd still be operating under the status quo argument that African American cuisine is represented by a narrow spectrum of food. Though her language can be somewhat encoded, De Knight is essentially saying 'I've talked to middle class black people, and y'all don't really know what middle class black people eat!' Now, I no longer want to have a conversation about what black people should cook. We've been cooking everything from day one."

Author: Helen Mendes
Published: 1971

Why it's influential: "Mendes's cookbook is a trail-blazing work because she's really the first one to show the culinary connections between West Africa and the Americas. This shattered the myth that African Americans had no culinary heritage. Mendes gives an encyclopedic understanding of African cooking and how that culinary legacy gets translated into southern food. She delves into the ways that African food and its agricultural past influenced the culinary practices of the New World, and the adjustments that Africans made to the indigenous foods of the Americas.

I love how Mendes establishes culinary diversity within the broad African Diaspora by detailing how a typical African cook comes of age and gets trained depending upon the tribe, what food procurement techniques they learned through fishing, foraging, and hunting. She also describes how an African cook progresses through learning different cooking and preservation techniques to complete her training. For example, an African cook-in-training would have to understand how to make sauces, different bread-making techniques, how to season with aromatic spices, how to utilize seeds, nuts, oils, fruits and vegetables to enhance flavor. In terms of preserving, the cook would have to learn how to dry, pickle, salt, and smoke different ingredients. That level of complexity had rarely been shown in a cook book for a mass audience in the United States.

I definitely feel that Mendes paved the way for the more comprehensive study and cookbooks that Dr. Jessica B. Harris wrote about various aspects of African heritage cooking in the Atlantic Rim."