The Bad Taste of America Co-opting Black Cuisine
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Several years ago, my mother crafted handmade family cookbooks for each of her sons as Christmas presents. The base of the gift was a red Campbell’s recipe book built like a photo album. She gutted its stock recipes and replaced them with typed and clean pages of her own gastronomic roadmaps.
More importantly (at least to the son who writes more than he cooks), the book leads with a compendium of photos, family history notes, and recollections from family dinners of the past. The origins of key traditions that had been taken for granted for years were explained, and anecdotes of visitors filled out the foliage of our culinary family tree. But in the end, the cookbook is a cherished gift whose value has little to do with the recipes it was created to hold. The instructions for a perfect creamed tuna on toast are a welcome addition to my kitchen arsenal but are not as fascinating as learning what a gandy dancer was, or what inspired my mother to commit all of our in-town famil to monthly dinners (confoundingly, it was the film Fried Green Tomatoes). My family’s stories about how the food got to our tables are just as important as the meals themselves.
