Toni Tipton-Martin, a culinary journalist and founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and Foodways Texas, won a James Beard Award for The Jemima Code, her groundbreaking history of the role of Black Americans in the development of the cuisines of the American South. Building on that research—much of it drawn from her own collection of 300-plus African American cookbooks— Tipton-Martin’s new Jubilee (Clarkson Potter, $35) complements the story of the food with brief portraits of the cooks, tavern keepers, and others usually left out of conventional histories and a rich selection of 125 of the actual recipes—ranging from gumbos and peanut soup to Caribbean roast pork and, from 1866, "forced meat" aka ground steak—each updated and adapted for today’s kitchens. Much more than “soul food,” these dishes were created by skilled and imaginative Black cooks who drew on a wide range of cuisines—and in turn influenced later American cooking.
