Black Women in Food Media — The Names Most Bibliographies Skip

The framing

For most of the 20th century, American food media — the cooking magazines, the food sections of major newspapers, the cookbook publishing houses — had a small number of editorially decisive figures, mostly white. The Black women working in the same industry built careers in spite of that gatekeeping, often by writing for Black newspapers, self-publishing, or doing the work that white-authored cookbooks would then borrow uncredited.

Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code and Klancy Miller's For the Culture (2023) do the recovery work. The names below are a short starter list.

Names

• Freda DeKnight. Food editor of Ebony from 1946 to 1963. Wrote A Date with a Dish (1948), one of the earliest mass-market American cookbooks by a Black woman.
• Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. Author of Vibration Cooking (1970). Covered separately on this site.
• Edna Lewis. Author of The Taste of Country Cooking (1976). Covered separately on this site.
• Princess Pamela. Owner of an East Village soul food restaurant in the 1960s and 70s; wrote Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook (1969). The book and the cook were almost lost to history.
• Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden. Sisters who wrote Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine (1978), a family memoir-cookbook.
• Jessica B. Harris. Covered separately on this site.
• Carla Hall. Television presence and chef, but more importantly author of Carla Hall's Soul Food (2018), which is a serious soul-food reference book.
• Toni Tipton-Martin. Covered separately on this site.
• Klancy Miller. Pastry chef, author of Cooking Solo (2016), founder of For the Culture magazine.
• Stephen Satterfield's Whetstone team — Osayi Endolyn, Kayla Stewart, Korsha Wilson — built the contemporary Black food-media bench.

How to use the list

This is a research starter. Pick one name a month. Read one book or one substantial article by that person. After a year you will have built an alternative food-media canon that the standard one mostly doesn't gesture at.

Cross-reference

Klancy Miller's For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food (2023) is the most current consolidated treatment. Buy it. It's also a sourcebook for the next book on the next person.

The names

The names that mainstream American food-media bibliographies have
historically skipped or under-credited:

• Malinda Russell (cookbook author, 1866). The earliest known
  Black-authored American cookbook.
• Abby Fisher (San Francisco, 1881). Dictated cookbook by a
  formerly enslaved cook.
• Princess Pamela Strobel (New York, 1969). Princess Pamela's
  Soul Food Cookbook — a Greenwich Village restaurateur whose
  cookbook went out of print for decades.
• Edna Lewis (Freetown, VA, 1976) — recovered relatively well
  but still under-cited.
• Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (Fairfax, SC, 1970) — see her
  dedicated essay.
• Toni Tipton-Martin (contemporary) — see The Jemima Code.
• Jessica B. Harris (contemporary) — extensively published, see
  her dedicated essay.
• Michael W. Twitty (contemporary — male author, but his
  recovery work centers Black women cooks throughout).
• Klancy Miller (contemporary). Founder of For the Culture
  magazine, focused on Black women in food.
• Carla Hall (contemporary). Television, cookbooks, Black-food
  advocacy.

Why the skip happened

The mechanism: mainstream American food media — the New York Times,
Bon Appétit, Saveur, the major cookbook reviews of the late 20th
century — operated with editorial staffs that were largely white
and largely male. Black women's cookbooks were published, sold to
their core readership, and rarely received the major-publication
review treatment that drove subsequent citations.

The result: the standard bibliography that a contemporary culinary
student would have learned from in the 1990s would have included
James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, MFK Fisher. It would
have included Edna Lewis sporadically. It would have included none
of the others on this list.

The recovery work

The recovery of these names is ongoing. The 2010s and 2020s have
produced significantly more visibility for Black women food
writers, both contemporary and historical. The Tipton-Martin work
on The Jemima Code and Jubilee is the most visible recent
intervention.

What to do

If you read American food media, audit your own bibliography. The
names above should be on the shelf. The recovery is not someone
else's project; the citing is everyone's.

Further reading

• Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code (2015).
• Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs
  (2006).
• Anne Bower (ed.), African American Foodways (2009).
• Klancy Miller's For the Culture magazine.