The first major Gullah Geechee cookbook from “the matriarch of Edisto Island,” who provides delicious recipes and the history of an overlooked American community The history of the Gullah and Geechee people stretches back centuries, when enslaved members of this community were historically isolated from the rest of the South because of their location on the Sea Islands of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Today, this Lowcountry community represents the most direct living link to the traditional culture, language, and foodways of their West African ancestors. Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, written by Emily Meggett, the matriarch of Edisto Island, is the preeminent Gullah cookbook. At 89 years old, and with more than 50 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Meggett is a respected elder in the Gullah community of South Carolina. She has lived on the island all her life, and even at her age, still cooks for hundreds of people out of her hallowed home kitchen. Her house is a place of pilgrimage for anyone with an interest in Gullah Geechee food. Meggett’s Gullah food is rich and flavorful, though it is also often lighter and more seasonal than other types of Southern cooking. Heirloom rice, fresh-caught seafood, local game, and vegetables are key to her recipes for regional delicacies like fried oysters, collard greens, and stone-ground grits. This cookbook includes not only delicious and accessible recipes, but also snippets of the Meggett family history on Edisto Island, which stretches back into the 19th century. Rich in both flavor and history, Meggett’s Gullah Geechee Home Cooking is a testament to the syncretism of West African and American cultures that makes her home of Edisto Island so unique.

Take a journey into Chef Charlotte Jenkins' creative kitchen, and also into her life. Charlotte and her husband Frank grew up Gullah at a time when the Old Ways were giving way to the New Ways, part of the generation that bridged those two worlds. Charlotte learned to cook the way her mama, her grandmamma and all the mamas that have come before her - by working alongside one another. She also trained at Johnson & Wales Culinary Institute in Charleston, where she adapted the traditional recipes to be more healthful. In1997, she and her husband Frank opened Gullah Cuisine in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and were widely acknowledged as offering the best of authentic Gullah cooking. This book brings Charlotte's wonderful recipes to you - and more than that. It's a tale of connection, sharing a world the Gullah built. Narrative is by critically-acclaimed author William P. Baldwin, photographs by Pulitzer Prize-nominee Mic Smith, and art by beloved Gullah painter Jonathan Green.

Theresa Jenkins Hilliard was born on Edisto Island, SC where she spent her early childhood under the guardianship of her beloved grandmother, Susan Jenkins, affectionately known as Mama Doonk. She developed an interest in cooking at an early age and watched attentively as her grandmother prepared the family meals. Her grandmother always involved her in the preparation of the meals by assigning her to whatever her little hands could do. This was her grandmother's way of teaching her. She later began cooking at an early age under her grandmother's tutelage. She has been preparing Gullah cuisine for her family and friends for the past sixty years. What began as a scrapbook of recipes for her children culminated into "Mama Doonk's Gullah Recipes" Book named for her grandmother. Theresa later moved to the historic Maryville/Ashleyville neighborhood in the West Ashley area of Charleston, on the site where Charleston was founded in 1670, to live with her mother Molly. Molly moved to Charleston during the Great Migration of the 1940s to work as a cook for a wealthy south of Broad Street family. Under her mother's tutelage, Theresa's love for cooking continued to grow. Food was always the focal point of every celebration. No matter the occasion, food was a part of it. Theresa always prepared the celebratory meals, which always included Gullah food. This book includes dishes prepared by her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt, as well as some of Theresa's favorite dishes that she has prepared during the years. You will find her grandmother's rabbit, opossum, and raccoon stew, shrimp and grits, corn fritters, okra soup, and mouthwatering homemade biscuits. She includes her mother's corn muffins and roast duck, as well as, her Aunt Edna's, squash casserole and easy pound cake. Her ancestors were all great cooks. This book gives you a glimpse of history when food were from the land, sea, wood, fields and trees, long before all of the modern conveniences of "store bought" food. Their food was literally from the field to the plate long before it became popular. Theresa adds some antidotes that will make you chuckle as you reminisce. Take a step back in time with her. This book will jog the memory of some and give others a peek into the past. "Hunna en had good eatin' 'til ya' grease ya' mouf' wid Gullah food." (You all haven't had good eating until you've eaten Gullah food). Theresa's descendants were members of a distinctive group of people known as Gullah-Geechee. Theresa stands on the wings of three very special women whose teachings have made a significant impact on her life. This book is dedicated to her beloved grandmother, Mama Doonk, her most treasured mother Molly and her dear aunt, Edna. Their recipes will live on forever between these pages.

Although technology and development were slow in coming to Daufuskie, the island is now changing rapidly. With this book, Robinson highlights some of her favorite memories and delicious recipes from life on Daufuskie, where the islanders traditionally ate what they grew in the soil, caught in the river, and hunted in the woods. The unique food traditions of Gullah culture contain a blend of African, European, and Native American influences. Reflecting the rhythm of a day in the kitchen, from breakfast to dinner (and anywhere in between), this cookbook collects seventy-five recipes for easy-to-prepare, robustly flavored dishes. Robinson also includes twenty-five folk remedies, demonstrating how in the Gullah culture, in the not-so-distant past, food and medicine were closely linked and the sea and the land provided what islanders needed to survive. In her spirited introduction and chapter openings, Robinson describes how cooking the Gullah way has enriched her life, from her childhood on the island to her adulthood on the nearby mainland.

Vibration Cooking was first published in 1970, not long after the term “soul food” gained common use. While critics were quick to categorize her as a proponent of soul food, Smart-Grosvenor wanted to keep the discussion of her cookbook/memoir focused on its message of food as a source of pride and validation of black womanhood and black “consciousness raising.” In 1959, at the age of nineteen, Smart-Grosvenor sailed to Europe, “where the bohemians lived and let live.” Among the cosmopolites of radical Paris, the Gullah girl from the South Carolina low country quickly realized that the most universal lingua franca is a well-cooked meal. As she recounts a cool cat’s nine lives as chanter, dancer, costume designer, and member of the Sun Ra Solar-Myth Arkestra, Smart-Grosvenor introduces us to a rich cast of characters. We meet Estella Smart, Vertamae’s grandmother and connoisseur of mountain oysters; Uncle Costen, who lived to be 112 and knew how to make Harriet Tubman Ragout; and Archie Shepp, responsible for Collard Greens à la Shepp, to name a few. She also tells us how poundcake got her a marriage proposal (she didn’t accept) and how she perfected omelettes in Paris, enchiladas in New Mexico, biscuits in Mississippi, and feijoida in Brazil. “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything,” writes Smart-Grosvenor. “I cook by vibration.” This edition features a foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson placing the book in historical context and discussing Smart-Grosvenor’s approach to food and culture. A new preface by the author details how she came to write Vibration Cooking.

In her third cookbook, the celebrity chef, television personality, and Gullah Tour guide interweaves stories about her family and life on Daufuskie Island with staple recipes of the Gullah diet.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

Patti LaBelle, living legend, beloved musical icon, “Godmother of Soul” (The New York Times), and New York Times bestselling cookbook author, crafts a new collection of her favorite comfort food recipes to help you bring joy and flavor to your family’s table. For Patti LaBelle, cooking isn’t simply about food—it’s about love. Raised in a family of fantastic Southern cooks, she has kept the lessons she learned in her beloved parents’ and aunts’ kitchens close to her heart but now, she is ready to share these delicious family heirlooms. Combining mouthwatering and accessible recipes with charming personal reminisces of her remarkable life—from learning to cook by observing her parents to whipping up meals for her band after dazzling shows—LaBelle Cuisine will fill your heart as well as your stomach. With a colorful variety of dishes as appetizing as Say-My-Name Smothered Chicken, Wicked Peach Cobbler, Fierce Fried Corn, and more, this cookbook is something to sing about.

“Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives…Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others’, and exploring different cultures, Twitty’s book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.”—Library Journal “A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.”—Booklist The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food. In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s own passage to and within Judaism. As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul. Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.