Cleora S Kitchens

Cleora's Kitchens tells the story of the Black settlement of Oklahoma. Cleora's parents, children of former slaves in Texas, came with other former slaves in covered wagons for free land and the hope Oklahoma was to become a Black and Indian state. These early settlers built Black towns and successful businesses. Oklahoma did not fulfill the promise of a Black and Indian state, but these pioneers prospered and made a good life for themselves. In Tulsa, Oklahoma the Black community of Greenwood was called the Black Wall Street of America.In 1921 a terrible Race Riot destroyed much of the thriving Greenwood community. The year after the riot Cleora moved to Tulsa to help rebuild from the ashes. Cleora joined the Vernon AME church and helped to feed the struggling community from the church kitchen. Cleora's amazing culinary gifts were soon recognized and she was in demand by both black and white Tulsa. She catered the Tulsa Opera Guild as well as the Greenwood Jazz Street dances. Cab Calloway, who often played in Greenwood, said Cleora's chicken and dumplings were the best in the world. Cleora describes the life of her pioneer family and gives us family recipes not to be found anywhere else.Cleora's mother's hickory nut cake, beaten biscuits, possum grape wine, mustard greens, and famous chicken and dumplings are beyond compare. Cleora shares her famous baked fudge recipe from her bakery she opened on Greenwood. Cleora also gives us recipes she cooked for newly rich oil families, both black and white. Donald Simmons, the first Black Oil man in America, paid for the typing of Cleora's hand written story and recipes.

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

Sheds light on the history of food, cooking, and eating. This collection of essays investigates the connections between food studies and women's studies. From women in colonial India to Armenian American feminists, these essays show how food has served as a means to assert independence and personal identity.

A volume based on the popular NPR radio series explores how communities come together through food, combining popular stories from the show with new interviews, photographs, and recipes from a wide array of atypical kitchens.

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. In Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. The enhanced electronic version of the book includes twenty letters, photographs, first-person narratives, and other documents, each embedded in the text where it will be most meaningful. Featuring nearly 100 pages of new material, the enhanced e-book offers readers an intimate view into the lives of domestic workers, while also illuminating the journey a historian takes in uncovering these stories.

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016 Art of Eating Prize, 2015 BCALA Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2016 Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind. The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.