So we decided that The Jemima Code would be one book and, if I could get a second shot at it, then a cookbook would follow. Once I finally got a book contract, we realized that it would be too much information for the reader to digest if they had to contend with recipes that didn’t fit into traditional categories.
You can see a version of Jubilee in the early iteration of The Jemima Code blog. I was determined to give these people back their agency. I am an investigative reporter, and the idea of writing in the first person was contrary to my training.
Blogging at that time was very first-person oriented. So I took The Jemima Code to the internet. The perception was that this was strictly scholarly work. No publisher or literary agent that would accept my first book when I initially got started. TONI TIPTON-MARTIN: Yes, and I knew it long before there was Jemima Code in its current form. There is also diversity amongst the cooks themselves-the men and women behind these recipes include, among others, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved French-trained cook, James Hemings co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale a Depression-era cooking school teacher named Sarah Helen Mahammitt and the renowned expert on Southern cooking, chef Edna Lewis. (His own collection was eventually purchased by the New York Public Library and turned into the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.) Recipes such as Jamaican jerk ribs, sweet potato mango cake, curried meat pies, and gingerbread waffles highlight the variety of African-American cooking contributed. A luminary of the Harlem Renaissance who set out to record black contributions to history and culture, Schromburg considered black cooking an important category of this achievement. How did she decide which recipes to feature? The more than one hundred foods Tipton-Martin chose to include in Jubilee were culled from a compilation of nearly four hundred seminal African American dishes curated by the Afro-Puerto-Rican historian Arturo Schomburg.
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