Section 14 · Figures
Who Built This
Not a hall of fame. A living bibliography of the people whose work makes this framework possible. Photographs and primary archives are being added as the project grows.
Archivers & historians
Archivers & historians
Toni Tipton-Martin
Toni Tipton-Martin is the reason we can say, with evidence, that Black Americans have been authoring their own cookbooks for more than two centuries. Her work The Jemima Code, a curated archive of 150+ Black-authored cookbooks going back to 1827, permanently refuted the idea that the Black Southern kitchen was illiterate or anonymous.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Dr. Jessica B. Harris
Dr. Jessica B. Harris is the preeminent scholar of the African diaspora's foodways. Her twelve books, most famously High on the Hog, trace the line from West African kitchens through the Atlantic and into every corner of the Americas.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Michael W. Twitty
Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian, cook, and living interpreter whose work The Cooking Gene braids genealogy, archival research, and plantation-era cookery into the most personally urgent account of Black Southern food we have.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Adrian Miller
Adrian Miller, the 'Soul Food Scholar,' is the historian of record for both soul food as a category and Black barbecue as a lineage. Soul Food and Black Smoke are the two books that together make the American barbecue story an accurate one.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Psyche Williams-Forson
Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland, has done the essential work of refusing the caricature. Her Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs turned one of the most abused racial stereotypes into a careful study of Black women's economic, cultural, and culinary power.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Donna Battle Pierce
Donna Battle Pierce is the journalist and archivist who has kept the Freda DeKnight / Ebony Magazine tradition of Black food writing alive. Her Skillet Diaries column and her ongoing archival work on Black women cookbook authors fills in a record the mainstream food press forgot to keep.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Freda DeKnight
Freda DeKnight was Ebony Magazine's first food editor and the author of A Date with a Dish (1948), the first nationally distributed cookbook of African American cooking gathered from across the country. Where earlier Black-authored cookbooks were regional or single-author, DeKnight's project was continental — a working portrait of how Black Americans actually cooked, from the Carolinas to California.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was a Gullah Geechee cook, poet, NPR commentator, and culinary anthropologist whose Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970) is one of the most original culinary voices of the 20th century. Part cookbook, part travel diary, part political manifesto — the book refused every convention of the genre and built a new one in its place.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Judith Carney
Dr. Judith Carney is the geographer and historian whose book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001) made the definitive scholarly case that rice culture in the Carolina Lowcountry was West African technology — the agronomic knowledge, the field engineering, the milling, the cooking — and not, as long claimed, a European or Asian inheritance.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Chefs who expanded the canon
Edna Lewis
Miss Lewis taught America that Black Southern cooking was a cuisine in the full sense, seasonal, disciplined, articulated, written down. The Taste of Country Cooking, organized by the year in Freetown, Virginia, is one of the most important cookbooks ever published in this country.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Leah Chase
Leah Chase ran Dooky Chase's in New Orleans for over sixty years. She fed the Freedom Riders in a room where interracial meetings were illegal. She fed Ray Charles, James Baldwin, the Obamas, and the neighborhood. She elevated Creole cooking into a serious, written, teachable cuisine.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Mashama Bailey
Mashama Bailey, chef of The Grey in Savannah, is one of the clearest contemporary interpreters of the Lowcountry tradition. Her James Beard Outstanding Chef award (2022) is less important than the way her menus argue that this food is already fine dining, and always has been.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Bryant Terry
Bryant Terry is the chef, activist, and editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books who has, more than anyone, expanded Black American cooking into plant-forward, globally diasporic, politically grounded territory. Vegetable Kingdom and Black Food (which he edited) are foundational.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Dora Charles
Dora Charles is the Savannah cook whose hands shaped one of the most famous Southern restaurants in America for two decades, with almost none of the credit. Her 2015 cookbook, A Real Southern Cook in Her Savannah Kitchen, is the corrective — a clear-eyed, technically precise record of the Lowcountry-inflected Black Southern cooking she had been doing all along.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Matthew Raiford
Matthew Raiford is a sixth-generation Gullah Geechee farmer-chef working the same Brunswick, Georgia farmland his family has held since 1874. As CheFarmer of Gilliard Farms and the author of Bress 'n' Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer and Chef, he is one of the clearest living keepers of the Georgia coast kitchen.
Read the entry →Agricultural innovators
Agricultural innovators
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver is typically reduced to 'the peanut man' in grade-school textbooks. That reduction hides the real contribution: a systematic, research-based approach to crop rotation, soil regeneration, and yield diversification built for Black farmers working the worn-out land of the post-Reconstruction South.
Read the entry →Agricultural innovators
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered as a civil rights organizer. She was also the founder of Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi, a 680-acre cooperative that fed, housed, and sustained Black families in the Delta during some of the hardest years of the movement.
Read the entry →Bartenders & beverage tradition
Bartenders & beverage tradition
Tom Bullock
Tom Bullock (1872–1964) was the bartender at the St. Louis Country Club and the author of The Ideal Bartender (1917), the first cocktail book published by a Black author in the United States. The book contains 173 recipes — many of them the earliest published versions of classics now treated as Anglo-American — and was prefaced by George Herbert Walker, whose grandson would become President George H. W. Bush.
Read the entry →Bartenders & beverage tradition
John Dabney
John Dabney (c.1824–1900) was the most famous mint julep maker in 19th-century America. Born enslaved in Virginia, he tended bar in Richmond hotels before and after Emancipation, and his juleps — built in chilled silver cups, packed with shaved ice, and crowned with a bouquet of mint and seasonal fruit — were nationally famous. The Prince of Wales drank one in Richmond in 1860.
Read the entry →Bartenders & beverage tradition
Cato Alexander
Cato Alexander (c.1780–1858) ran Cato's, a tavern and roadhouse on the Boston Post Road four miles north of New York City, for nearly fifty years. His brandy punches, his egg nog, and his mint juleps were celebrated in the New York press of the 1820s and 1830s, and he was credited by his contemporaries with shaping the American style of mixed drinks.
Read the entry →Bartenders & beverage tradition
Dr. Tiffanie Barriere
Dr. Tiffanie Barriere — known professionally as The Drinking Coach — is the contemporary historian, bartender, and educator who has done the most to recover and teach the Black bartending tradition in the present. Her lectures, classes, and consulting work bring Tom Bullock, John Dabney, Cato Alexander, and the unnamed Black bartenders of the 19th century back into the working knowledge of the modern bar.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Georgia Gilmore
Georgia Gilmore was a Montgomery, Alabama cook who, during the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized an underground catering operation she called the Club from Nowhere. Selling pound cakes, sweet potato pies, and full plates of fried chicken and greens out of her home, she generated the steady cash that kept the boycott's carpool system running.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Sylvia Woods
Sylvia Woods opened Sylvia's Restaurant on Lenox Avenue in Harlem in 1962 with a 35-seat luncheonette. Over the next sixty years she built it into the institution that fed the neighborhood, the city, four generations of Harlem families, presidents, civil rights leaders, and tourists from every continent. She was named the Queen of Soul Food and earned it.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Community Cooks & Oral-Tradition Holders
This is a category, not a single person. Every church cook, every pit master with no cookbook, every grandmother who taught by hand and never by measurement, every line cook who made a restaurant famous and was never named on the menu. They are the reason this tradition survived at all.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Cornelia Bailey
Cornelia Walker Bailey (1945–2017) was the griot of Sapelo Island, Georgia — the keeper of the Saltwater Geechee culture, the steward of the Purple Ribbon sugarcane and the Sapelo red pea, and the author of God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man. Her work is the spine of the Sapelo cultural record.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Sallie Ann Robinson
Sallie Ann Robinson is the sixth-generation Daufuskie Island, South Carolina cook whose Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way (2003) and Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night (2007) are two of the clearest first-person Gullah cookbooks in print. She was one of Pat Conroy's students in the one-room schoolhouse he wrote about in The Water Is Wide.
Read the entry →Community cooks & oral-tradition holders
Princess Pamela Strobel
Princess Pamela Strobel ran a tiny East Village soul food restaurant — Princess Pamela's Little Kitchen — from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. The room sat fewer than thirty people. Diana Ross, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Gloria Steinem ate there. Her self-published Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook (1969) circulated for decades as a near-mythic out-of-print object before Rizzoli reissued it in 2017.
Read the entry →