![]() ![]() Most of all, Schomburg was keen on exploring “how the negro genius has adapted receipts taught him by his masters just as he adapted the stern Methodist hymns and the dour tenets of Protestantism and how he has modified them to express his own peculiar artistic powers.” One scholar to come across the outline, sociologist John Brown Childs, evocatively wrote in 1984 that Schomburg’s vision highlighted how black foodways subverted and converted “the food of oppression into the staff of life.”įor reasons unknown, Schomburg’s proposal never came to fruition, but its spirit deeply infuses the work of food historian and writer Toni Tipton-Martin, especially her new cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. ![]() In his outline, Schomburg detailed plans to document some 400 recipes that would have cataloged everything from “traces of Africanisms which still persist in American dishes,” such as okra gumbo, to newer “‘invented’ dishes to take the bad taste of charity away from the victuals doled out by relief committees,” presumably including dishes built around offal or cheap beans and rice. SOMETIME DURING THE 1920s, noted Harlem historian and bibliophile Arturo Schomburg composed an ambitious proposal for one of the greatest African-American cookbooks never written. ![]()
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