When Toni Tipton-Martin comes to town for the Illumination Charleston celebration on Dec. 7, the author and foodways historian will do what she does best: highlight the contributions African Americans have made to the country’s culinary culture.
In her two most recent books, Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice and When Southern Women Cook, she narrowed the focus even more to the hidden treasures of the food world: the ancient, the precious and the often overlooked.
Black drinking traditions, for example, were often derided in popular culture.
“Depictions of people having a good time or at a club after work were unfairly stereotyped as people of color wasting their money,” Tipton-Martin said in an interview with the Charleston City Paper. “It seems to be consistent with the way society has portrayed African Americans … not just our relationship to food but in so many other ways.”
In Juke Joints, a collection of recipes and cultural anecdotes, she reframes that narrative as one of a vibrant drinking culture, and unveils its relationship to comfort, music and even healing.
“I primarily focused on African American drinkways,”she said. “I traced it far back, to the African continent, where women were responsible for creating beer. It makes perfect sense. Those drinks require a mash, something you cook, so it makes sense that those were the areas women would excel in.
“Women in the plantation era, in Monticello, carried on and made beers and ciders,” she continued, “but they were also using herbs and berries and other wild things they could forage to make what we call liqueurs today. Cordials also have been part of the apothecary in the kitchen cabinet, like blackberry syrup was good for dysentery in the old days.”
Drinks in this culture evolved along with the role of African Americans in society — from whiskey used to pacify and control slaves, to juke joints offering comfort to rural persons of color, to part of the luxury inventory of black merchants who were able to maintain a higher standard of living, Tipton-Martin said.
“The focus is to look at the professional class or more privileged class of African American, rather than at the survival cooking, the soul foods, so prominently portrayed in American food culture,” she said.
“If there’s going to be a counter-narrative to the juke joint, a rural shack in the woods on the fringes of an agricultural community, then a jazz club in the music district is the opposite of that. It was more urban, for people working in urban settings. The environment could be more refined. People have a little more disposable income and can pay for mixers, sweeteners and flavors. [Later], when jazz leaves New Orleans and migrates north, many of those cultural dynamics travel along with the musicians, so we find ourselves drinking uniquely Louisiana drinks like the Sazerac or the French 75.”
In When Southern Women Cook, Tipton-Martin relied on collective memory and first-hand accounts, inviting 70 women writers to tell stories that represent the feminist side of Southern cooking.
One contributor, Robin Lee Griffith, of Columbia, SC, has strong ties to Charleston.
Griffith is a descendent of Eliza Seymour Lee, a Charleston cooking luminary and business owner from the 1800s.
“She was my great-grandmother times three. We used to call her ‘G-3,’” Griffith said. “We have a plum pudding recipe of hers that doesn’t have plums (that’s just what they called preserved fruit back then). It’s made with suet. Toni asked how we could modernize [it], and we worked on different ideas.”
The result, dubbed the Porter Plum Pudding Layer Cake, is featured in the cookbook, along with Griffith’s reflections on Lee (see sidebar for more). “We grew up hearing stories about this woman,” she said of her desire to document her family’s foodways.
“America has a love-hate relationship with black people,” Tipton-Martin said. “We want great things like soul food, but the rest?” It’s a rhetorical question, but her motives for writing the books are unequivocal.
“We’ve reached a place where we’ve … lost the ability to see shared humanity in people who don’t look like us or believe what we believe. I tell stories using food as the common ground in our common humanity.”
Famous ancestor, Eliza Seymour Lee
Eliza Seymour Lee is one of the women featured in Toni Tipton-Martin’s book When Southern Women Cook.
Her descendent, Robin Lee Griffith, said she can understand why it was important to include Lee.
“She was considered one of Charleston’s top chefs, if not one of the top chefs on the East Coast,” Griffith said. “Her mother, Sally Seymour, had been enslaved and, after she passed, Eliza inherited her baking shop and small catering operation at 10 Tradd Street. She grew it into four or five businesses. The Mansion House on Broad Street was really famous. She [also] sold pastries out of her home at 92 Tradd. She had her mom’s business, a boarding house and a bed-and-breakfast type of place on Sullivans Island (although that one only lasted about a year).
“As dignitaries would come to town, aristocracy and people from Europe, they would all go to the Mansion House, and then write about it in their memoirs,” Griffith shared.
Lee also mentored others, a tradition carried on from her mother, who was sent as a slave to Europe to learn to cook. Plantation owners would send their slaves to Seymour to learn how to cook, and she would share her knowledge, running what almost became an early cooking school, Griffith said.
Lee learned the pastries, aspics, jellies, sauces and pickles that her mother specialized in, and passed that knowledge along to her own apprentices, one of whom included Nat Fuller, a famous private chef of the Antebellum era.
Part of the Mansion House, long since fallen, has been reconstructed in the Winterthur Museum in Delaware as an example of an historical fine dining structure from Charleston.
Griffith said she grew up with stories of her famous ancestor and is determined to keep her memory alive.
That includes the tale of the famous pickle recipe, sold for a pittance by Seymour Lee’s sons to the company that would grow into Heinz. Apparently, when Griffith’s mother shared the story with the company, she received a souvenir plastic pickle in response.
“It takes a village to tell a story, and I’m glad Toni did this,” Griffith said. “At the end of the day, this was a black woman in the mid-1800s who had the success she did in a day when she had to have papers just to walk down the street, to go to the store. I’m just trying to keep her story alive.
RECIPE – From Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice
SORREL
Sorrel is a red flowering plant that blooms around Christmastime and is the basis for a traditional holiday beverage in the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. The flow- ers are steeped with ginger, citrus juice, and spices to make a dark red aromatic drink that goes by the same name in the Caribbean. The beverage is called jamaica in Spanish-speaking cultures, and in Africa, “Nigerians call it zobo. Ghanaians call it sobolo, while Senegalese, Congolese, Malians, and Burkinabes call it bissap,” as Marcus Samuelsson explains in his 2020 book, The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.
The following recipe is adapted from one in my 2019 cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. It blends ingredients and tech- niques I learned from several cookbooks. Here are a few of those ideas:
First, you can personalize the spices according to your own tastes, substituting cardamom, nutmeg, or star anise for the cinnamon or cloves, and use up to ⅓ cup sliced fresh ginger, as is customary at Christmastime. And if you can’t find fresh sorrel flowers, dried hibiscus flowers are a good substitute.
Additionally, the serving ideas for this drink are endless. Serve the sweet-tart beverage as is, dilute with sparkling water, or treat guests at your Juneteenth picnic to Hibiscus Tea Cocktails (see variation, page 35) by infusing the base with a splash of rum—dark, full-bodied Jamaican or light and dry white. I also love food writer Nicole Taylor’s take in her 2022 Black celebrations cookbook, Watermelon and Red Birds. She pours the drink over a mound of crushed ice for a refreshing hot-weather treat: sorrel snow cones. And Marcus Samuelsson recommends ginger and hibiscus flower granita for a refreshing after-dinner palate cleanser in his 2020 book, The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. To make this drink into a granita, simply freeze it into a block, then scrape and scoop the crystals into chilled glasses.
Here’s another fun fact from Enid Donaldson’s 2000 book, The Real Taste of Jamaica: If you want to ferment the flowers the island way, cover the petals with boiling water and steep at room temperature for 24 hours, Add 1 tablespoon of uncooked rice to speed the process. makes 8 servings
6 cups water
2 cups fresh sorrel flowers or dried hibiscus flowers
2 tablespoons sliced peeled ginger, cut ¼ inch thick
1 (2- to 3-inch) cinnamon stick
6 whole cloves
¼ cup grated fresh orange zest
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon or lime
½ cup cane syrup, honey, or agave nectar, or to taste
Mint leaves
8 lemon slices
In a large saucepan over medium heat, bring
the water, flowers, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and orange and lemon zests to a boil. Boil for 15 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Transfer to a bowl, cover, and refrigerate for 1 to 2 days to allow the flavors to mellow.
Strain and discard the solids. Stir in the syrup and serve, garnished with mint leaves and lemon slices.
variation: For Hibiscus Tea Cocktails, stir ½ cup dark or white rum into the drink along with the desired sweetener. Fill Collins glasses one-half to two-thirds full with ice cubes.
Pour in about 5 ounces (10 tablespoons) of hibiscus cocktail mix. Garnish with mint leaves and lemon slices.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
