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.īear 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.
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. The earliest published book in her collection is a servants' guide written by Robert Roberts in 1827. To answer that question, she began collecting cookbooks authored by African Americans. She wondered aloud, "Where are the black cooks?" Martin was exposed to a cornucopia of food cultures and their cookbooks, but she rarely saw anything reflecting her own culinary tradition. In 1985, Martin got a job as a food writer at the Los Angeles Times and worked under the tutelage of Ruth Reichl. Though her family had Southern roots, and soul-food dishes graced her family table, she grew up eating a wide variety of foods. She grew up in the black, middle-class neighborhood of Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles, California. Martin tired of the continued slights towards African Americans, especially since none of the myths squared with her personal experience. 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. 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. "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. 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.įor Martin, the skewed perception of African-American cooking is a symptom of a system of oppression she calls the Jemima code. 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.
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