In this episode of the Biscuits & Jam Podcast, Southern Living's Sid Evans sits down with Toni Tipton-Martin, Editor-in-Chief of Cook’s Country Magazine and culinary historian extraordinaire! Raised in Los Angeles with her Southern-born grandmother, a professional chef, Toni discovered her roots and developed a passion for African American food culture. They discuss these early influences, her new book, 'When Southern Women Cook,' podcasting, and more.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Tony Tipton-Martin, welcome to Biscuits & Jam.
00:03Thanks for having me. It's fun to be here.
00:06So, Tony, where am I reaching you right now? Are you at home? Are you on the road?
00:11I'm at home in my closet studio.
00:16So, whatever you guys see in the background, you're privy to that. What does she do in the closet?
00:23Well, at least you have a studio, and you sound great, and you look great.
00:27So, it's good to see you.
00:29Thanks. It's good to be here with you.
00:30So, Tony, it is not often that I interview another editor on this show.
00:36I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about how unusual this is for both of us, actually.
00:42I know. It's definitely a first for me. You're the editor-in-chief of Cook's Country, which is a magazine that I admire greatly.
00:53And it's just a real honor to have you here.
00:56Well, it's actually an honor to be with you, too. It definitely shows the spirit of cooperation, right?
01:01Even if we have competing magazines and products, we can still be friends and share ideas.
01:09Yeah, absolutely.
01:09So, I really like that. I really like that.
01:12Yeah, well, me too.
01:13Thank you. And you have something that I wish I could add to my job title, which is you've called yourself a culinary detective, which is about as cool as it gets, as far as I'm concerned.
01:26I really wish I had thought of that, but someone else attributed that to my work, and I thought it was just so clever.
01:33Yeah, well, I love it, and something to aspire to for me one day.
01:38It echoes all the way back to the beginning of my career, because I was not really interested in features and soft news. I wanted to be a hard news reporter, so it works really well.
01:47Well, it is a fitting description of a lot of your career, and also your latest project, which is called When Southern Women Cook, which is really an extraordinary book.
02:06I have just seen the PDF. I have not seen the finished book yet, but it's really a remarkable collection of recipes. The subtitle for it is History, Lore, and 300 Recipes with Contributions from 70 Women Writers.
02:31I mean, it's just incredibly ambitious. What was the spark that started that project?
02:38Well, it's a spark that has been lurking around inside of my head for, I don't know, as far back as my days as president of Southern Foodways Alliance.
02:49And as I write in the introduction, I was clearly an outsider to the South, but I had a very deep passion for the men and women who had cooked in the South, and that was across race.
03:02And more and more and more, the longer that I was there, more and more of the women started to meet with me in all kinds of places to talk about their concerns about the portrayal of women throughout history.
03:18They knew that I was interested in understanding more about the true role of African Americans, but to hear that there were women who I thought of as accomplished and who had achieved so much in the food world, still being frustrated, expressing their frustration.
03:35And this went on in the lobby. We had conversations in the ladies' room. We had sessions after sessions in somebody's hotel room late at night. It just became a center of my work that women were starting to reveal their concerns to me.
03:58And this is a celebration of those women.
04:01Yes, it is. It is. My work, generally speaking, stems also from having children who were educated in the public school system and realizing that so often the history that is told is told from a male paternalistic point of view.
04:21And so my kids would sit in these suburban classrooms, and the first point of history is the colonization of America and, of course, enslavement. And there were my kids not hearing anything positive.
04:36And I never wanted to be Pollyannish about it. I remember saying that so many times throughout my time in the South that I don't want to be naive and misrepresent what truly happened.
04:49But I do think there's been a lot of misrepresentation of what truly happened between white and black people in the American South and in its food world.
04:59I'll say this again later, but I can't recommend the book enough to people who really want to learn the story of so many recipes that have really defined Southern culture.
05:18And it's just a really remarkable collection and also very thoughtfully put together.
05:29I wanted to ask you about the very first recipe in the book, which is for hoe cakes.
05:37And I'm wondering why that one. Why did you want to start there? Why did that feel like the right place to kind of launch into all this content?
05:50Well, I have to give credit to my partners in crime here, Morgan Bowling, who is an executive editor on my team at Cook's Country, and Casey Highsmith, who is a historian in North Carolina.
06:04And they were instrumental in really cultivating and curating the recipe list and the order in which it would be represented.
06:18This was new content in some ways for Morgan.
06:21So I think I have to first say that the recipes are all derived primarily from the Cook's Country archive.
06:28And that was her first challenge from me was before we could even entertain talking about women and stories.
06:35We first had to understand what was going on in the ATK Cook's Country archive of recipes.
06:40And so she called those initially looking for a timeline, right, just how things went together in American history.
06:51And from that began the search for stories about women that were affiliated with any of those, as many of those dishes as possible.
07:00And so hoe cakes are such a simple recipe that is really the beginning of the beginning of American cooking.
07:10We know from cookbook history that early cookbooks by Amelia Simmons and others were basically recreations and bought with borrowings from European cookbooks.
07:22But they did center on some very specific ingredients that were native to America, to the Americas.
07:31And corn, of course, was one of those.
07:34And so that made sense for us to begin there because it's such a simple recipe.
07:38It's approachable and anyone can do it.
07:40And from that recipe, you're able to see a lineage of other cornbread-based dishes that change shape and scope depending upon one's pantry and access to eggs and milk and other essential ingredients, wheat flour.
08:00But at its core, those hoe cakes are just simple, hardtack, the basic, the basic food that we share between us.
08:12Yeah.
08:12Well, it's interesting that you kind of made this connection between Native American cooking and African American cooking right out of the gate.
08:20Yeah.
08:21So we had the most fun in North Carolina at the Terra Vida Festival several years ago.
08:29And a couple of the women who are contributors to the book were on a panel with me.
08:37And we were talking about cornbread as the ultimate unifier because almost every culture has some way that they interpret that first set of ingredients, cornmeal and water.
08:50And the talk that we gave looked at the cultures and we also served the breads of those cultures as part of the conversation.
09:02So that after each one of us spoke, you'd really get an interpretation of what does it mean when a Latinx woman makes her cornbread, whatever she calls it?
09:12What does it mean when I make it?
09:14How is it when Melinda Lowry makes it as a Lumbee Indian?
09:17And ultimately, as Ronnie pointed out, Ronnie Lundy points out, how is it made in an Appalachian woman's household?
09:26And it was just a fascinating experience to be able to share that with the attendees in that session.
09:34I will go on quickly to say that the whole session sprung from an activity that I created years and years ago for use with my nonprofit.
09:47And I wanted people to really dig in and understand the nuances of how we could be so much alike and so different.
09:55So starting just with the idea that you can have a pan and cornmeal and a liquid, I put together a table exercise where participants in a workshop were given all kinds of choices of ingredients that they would make.
10:12So you start with a little plastic baggie, which is your mixing bowl, and you put a sticker on according to your pan choice.
10:21Is it a square pan, a metal pan, a glass pan, a cast iron skillet?
10:26So you chose your appropriate sticker.
10:28And then you walk down two sides of banquet tables, so 16 feet worth of selections.
10:35There were the dry ingredients, the liquid ingredients, the dairy, and then all of these crazy, the sweeteners, and of course the miscellaneous things.
10:44And at the end, everyone comes back and talks about what's in their bag.
10:50And did you put jalapenos?
10:51Did you put sugar?
10:52Did you put honey?
10:53Did you put molasses?
10:54How about sorghum?
10:55How about nothing?
10:56How about wheat flour?
10:58How about masa?
10:59It was so much fun and such a great way to equalize for us, ultimately, the goal that I've had all along, which is to show the way that food unifies us.
11:11What a cool exercise.
11:13What a cool thing to do and to have people get their hands into it and see what they come up with.
11:21And it just sounds like a really must have yielded some very interesting conversation.
11:27Well, as a cook, right, we think in terms of someone invites you to come in, they want to see a demo, right?
11:33But I wanted this to be part participatory.
11:37And so we ran it a couple of times.
11:39We ran it at IACP, International Association of Culinary Professionals.
11:44And everyone had to wait outside the door, as they generally do for the session.
11:49And the door monitors give them instructions.
11:52No talking, just go through the line, pick up – the instructions are all right there for you.
11:58And by the time they get to the front of the line, they aren't paying attention to the rules.
12:02They're talking to each other.
12:04They're wondering what's in your bag, what's in your pot.
12:08And they have so much fun sharing, right?
12:11And it removes all of that stigma.
12:13One of the women who spoke that day, or a man, I don't recall, said, I'm not from this country because this is an international organization.
12:21And so we don't consume that.
12:23And it was a fascinating experience for him to just go through, or her, and decide what sounded good to them.
12:31And this person was really happy to share that.
12:34There were others who shared that sugar, as Ronnie and I have debated, doesn't belong in cornbread.
12:41And they were willing to stand firm on that.
12:43The age-old debate, yes.
12:44That's right.
12:45That's right.
12:45So we just – it was just so neutralizing.
12:49It was an extension of everything we tried to achieve over those three days at Southern Foodways Alliance.
12:55I could have an immediate – I could have the immediate gratification of seeing the impact, right?
13:03Over the course of those three days, we knew people were changed.
13:06But when they left, we weren't always sure the impact in their lives.
13:11We knew something had impacted them through the process as it was created, where you learn something new about a culture you think you know.
13:20Then you are confined to a meal with people you don't know, with this new information that is challenging you in some way.
13:28And everybody goes home as friends at the end.
13:32And I wanted desperately to see what else happens after that.
13:38And this exercise let me do that.
13:39Well, I want to come back to the book in a minute.
13:42But first, I'd just love to hear a little bit about your background.
13:46You grew up in Los Angeles?
13:48I did.
13:48I do have some Southern because it's Southern California.
13:51Okay.
13:52Yeah.
13:53But it's so interesting for someone who's written as much as you have about Southern food.
13:58Tell me a little bit about the kitchen where you grew up and who was doing the cooking and what was on the table.
14:06Yeah, great question.
14:07So in my early years, probably until I was about six years old, my grandmother made the most impression on me culinarily.
14:14We lived in the house with her as my parents were saving to buy their first home.
14:20And they were very aspirational.
14:21They didn't just want to live in the neighborhood where all of the people of the city were sort of confined by redlining and other practices at the city level.
14:31They wanted to – they aspired to live beyond that.
14:34And so they were saving their money.
14:35And we lived with my grandmother, Nanny, for some years in my early life.
14:41And she was an amazing cook.
14:42She was also a professional cook.
14:44And we often heard of her as referred to as a chef.
14:48She was the chef at the Wilshire E. Bell Theater, or she was the chef at what was Macy's, the precursor to Macy's in L.A.
14:57And there were lots of Southern emblems on the table.
15:01We just didn't know that they had any kind of designation.
15:07So she made amazing red beans and rice and fried fish.
15:13So you did grow up with some Southern food.
15:15So I grew with some of those.
15:17Yeah, cornmeal, cornbreads for sure.
15:21And then my mother carried on those traditions in my next phase of life as an elementary school-aged child.
15:29But my mother became vegetarian quickly after my grandmother passed suddenly.
15:34My mother was shocked into believing that you are what you eat.
15:38And I think that helped me become a nutrition writer for some years also, was just having that background, almost like a fear of food.
15:47Really, I grew up with the next phase of that love that my grandmother created with a fear of food.
15:54By the time I get to high school and college and start to form my own ways of thinking, I took a little recipe box.
16:03I don't remember if my mother got it for me.
16:06And I started collecting a few recipes here and there for things that were important to me.
16:11The first two, one was my grandmother's cornbread dressing.
16:17Interestingly, my mother helped me capture that recipe.
16:21And the second one was my paternal grandmother's pound cake.
16:26And the cornbread dressing, I'm guessing that was something that was maybe on the table.
16:30Every Thanksgiving.
16:31At the holidays?
16:31Yeah.
16:32Yeah, every Thanksgiving.
16:33Yeah, and my mother adapted it.
16:35She discovered that making it the day before allowed the flavors to actually penetrate and really create a voluptuous, I don't want to say creamy, but really not a dense dressing.
16:49And I didn't make it for years.
16:50I had this little recipe box, and I didn't make it until I was married, and I was terrified to make it the first time.
17:00Because by then I was a food writer, and I understood the complications, right?
17:04That if you stir it too much or you pack it too much into the pan, that you needed a light touch, or what Ruth Gaskins, a writer from the 60s, called a deft hand.
17:16Yes, right.
17:18But I'm sure you've mastered it by now.
17:19Yes, I have.
17:20Use a fork.
17:24Well, Tony, so a big part of your journey has been about cookbooks and collecting cookbooks.
17:32You have a remarkable cookbook collection that is probably one of the most extensive collections of African American cookbooks out there.
17:42You said in Jubilee, I think it was that you'd collected nearly 400, and I imagine by now it's more than that.
17:53What was one of the first books that you collected that really had an impact on you?
17:58Yeah, well, I can go back to the very first book in my possession, which was the Ebony Cookbook by Frida DeKnight, which is also known as the Date with a Dish book.
18:10And it was published in 1948.
18:12So as I said, I was on my own food journey once I got into high school.
18:21And as a college student, I had a professor who was an LA Times reporter, and he suggested that I work at the local newspaper to get some experience and get out in front of my fellow students.
18:35When we all graduated, I'd have some experience, real lived experience.
18:40And I was hired at the weekly newspaper in LA, and quickly the editor there said, well, you're the only one that has a lot of time on their hands because you're part-time, so we need you to do the food section.
18:54And being my father's daughter, I was like, well, I've got to know about food.
18:57And so I purchased, I went to the bookstore, the library, and this book called to me.
19:06And so it was one of my first purchases was the Ebony Cookbook because I understood Ebony having had that magazine in my household, so I knew what it represented.
19:15And over time, I didn't realize what a treasure that really was because it truly triggered for me something that I carried inside me and didn't really know was there, which was this passion for middle class and invisible cooks.
19:32So I kept seeing portrayals of African Americans in American kitchens and specifically in Southern kitchens, but they never were represented the way that I recognized them and the way they were portrayed by Ebony.
19:46Was there a particular recipe in there that kind of jumped out at you, or was there a story in there that you connected with?
19:55No, I think it was just the, I made that connection that I knew what Ebony, I had seen Ebony on the table at home, on the coffee table, and I knew these were always really beautiful, educated, proficient people.
20:11And that was, that just was such a contradiction to all of the portrayals of the plantation mammy and the servant class, that it was more about the people, which has truly been my orientation, even though I am editor-in-chief of a food magazine, and I was trained at newspapers in the food section.
20:33But at my core, I'm a storyteller, I'm in pursuit of righting the wrongs that have been done to humans, not recipes.
20:45What are some of the things that you learned over the years about the way that these recipes were written and put down?
20:53You know, there's, if you look at all these cookbooks that you've collected, you know, you're coming from America's Test Kitchen, a place where every step, every detail is very clearly laid out.
21:10That's not the way that cookbooks were written back then.
21:14And you're looking way back.
21:16I'm just, you know, how do you kind of interpret some of these?
21:22And it must be a little bit, well, it's a little bit of a detective work, I guess, to try and sort of figure out what they intended with this, you know, with this recipe.
21:34Such a great question.
21:35And it does speak back to the detective work.
21:38It's a piece of investigative journalism is really what I have done.
21:42Facts are important to me as a journalist, and not having the actual voices of people, like there were no published authors in my world, and no food people, right?
21:54This neighborhood where my parents moved was comprised mostly of educators and entertainers and celebrities and a different level of class.
22:05And so I didn't see cooks on a regular basis anywhere.
22:11So I had a couple of ideas before collecting cookbooks for the way that I would get to those people.
22:16And ultimately, what I was able to do is take the experience that I learned in the test kitchen at the LA Times, and the science and chemistry embedded in a recipe, as you described, and then quickly just look at what steps they left out.
22:37And when you read scholarship about particular time periods, as it relates to recipes, they often mention the mindset of the cook, that women who were producing community cookbooks were raising money for greater causes.
22:55That the women who were, some women who were directing these recipe books at their servants, right?
23:04So that they would have the recipes from the previous generation to hand down and perpetuate and continue the flavors that the family had grown accustomed to.
23:15And there were those who felt that as people who were training up the next generation of workers, that trainee class, trainer class, had the understanding of the methodology.
23:29So they could say, make a cake in the usual way in a recipe or make a stock, and they didn't have to go any further than that because everyone who would be doing that work would have understood that.
23:42So it required me not having that expertise to find legitimate and accurate sources for not only the representation of the African Americans who held the knowledge but didn't deliver all of it, but for the modern cook that has little knowledge in some ways and needed for those gaps to be filled in.
24:06And I did not want them to all be viewed through me and how I would make the cake.
24:10I wanted these to be recipes that could stand the test of time and represent classics.
24:18So there's not much about me in these pages, and there's little about my way of doing it.
24:26It's almost like you're kind of reaching your hand out back through history and kind of bringing their creation into the modern age and giving them a new audience.
24:39Yes, absolutely.
24:40And recipes were just one part of it because of the affection that I had for my grandmother and for the affection that I discovered spending so much time in the South.
24:53I lived in LA and what I knew about the South was portrayed by Hollywood caricature and literature that I learned about in school.
25:04And I didn't have a lived experience with Southerners and Southerness because my mother rejected all of that when she left the South.
25:11So it wasn't until I was spending so much time there and meeting people who genuinely had a passion for the women who had cooked in their house.
25:21This wasn't just Faulkner's way of appreciating, I forget her name now, starts with a C.
25:30There's even a gravestone to her in Oxford.
25:33In Oxford, I know, I can't remember.
25:35So Edgerton would spank us both.
25:41But anyway, those women were not only fictional characters.
25:45There were elements of them that were true that, as I say in the first book, The Jemima Code,
25:49it's almost as if the observers and the people who wrote mainstream books or created the caricatures took little pieces of what they knew about the Black women in their communities
26:02and rolled them up into this one character that everyone knew through media as Mammy or Aunt Jemima.
26:13And yet there were all these pieces of her, there are facets of her that could still be explored.
26:20And her cooking wasn't all there was.
26:23All of the films, all of the books, all of the stories tell you about how she raised the children.
26:28She made sure that the children were mannered and respectful.
26:37And she even chastised the adults, right?
26:40And she was portrayed sometimes negatively for that.
26:43But there's a certain type of decorum that she communicated.
26:48And it was twisted in the way that it was described.
26:51So my vision has been all along that I would tell, reveal different aspects of these cooks in different books.
26:59The first book, The Jemima Code, was there just to prove to you that they existed.
27:05And then Jubilee looked at their recipes.
27:08What can we learn from them?
27:10Besides their recipes for pancakes, which we love to praise them for.
27:18And Juke Joints then goes into single subject and starts to look at particular careers.
27:25Yeah.
27:25And I want to ask you about that one in a minute.
27:29Before we do that, you mentioned John Edgerton.
27:32And you came to the Southern Living offices here about 25 years ago for a gathering of writers and scholars who kind of laid the groundwork for the Southern Foodways Alliance.
27:49What did it mean to you at the time to be invited to that meeting?
27:54I was very confused.
27:55I was confused.
27:56I was confused about the invitation and what I could possibly contribute.
28:04Again, knowing what I knew about Southern cooks from reading their recipe books, they were all very opinionated about who made the best biscuits.
28:15And I just didn't know that I had anything to contribute, especially if the portrayal of my ancestry was through the lens of survival cooking.
28:26I had even less to say.
28:28But I met John Edgerton five years prior to that in Atlanta at the National Food Editors and Writers Association meeting.
28:39And he said a couple of things from the podium that were so provocative to me that I went over to him at the conclusion of his remarks.
28:51And I said, I don't know you, but I've never heard anyone give so much credit and respect to my ancestors.
28:59And I just want to thank you for that.
29:02And he said, I have something for you.
29:05Meet me in the press room in the next half an hour.
29:08I have to go to my car.
29:09And I met him in the press room and he tore through his, as he was, his briefcase with lots of papers in it.
29:17And he gave me the first book that started this process.
29:20He had just returned from the Library of Congress with this book.
29:24And I sat with that book for a while.
29:26I still wasn't sure what to do with it.
29:27And then this invitation comes along where he invited me to join this group of 50 founders and shared with us the idea that has stuck with me.
29:39And that I have really, and that's animating me, the idea that food is a tool toward unification.
29:49And so I went, and everybody was very curious.
29:55They asked me, like, who are you and how did you get in here?
29:58And some of those people have become my dearest friends.
30:04Well, as John Edgerton did, it seems that you had a very long connection with him.
30:15And he wrote the introduction to your award-winning book, The Jemama Code.
30:22And it seems that he had a really huge influence on you throughout your career.
30:31I mean, tell me just a little bit about your relationship with him.
30:34Like so many people, I loved him very much.
30:38And at his memorial, all of the speakers spoke about John's propensity to lean in when he spoke to you.
30:48And he always made you feel like you were the only person in the room.
30:52And there was something very special and unique about you that you needed to unearth for yourself.
30:58So he was very much a mentor, but not an enabler.
31:04And he was definitely not interested in using his imprimatur or his influence to elevate me because he knew it wouldn't be good for me and my temperament anyways.
31:15But it wasn't good.
31:15You know, it's just not him.
31:18So extracting that intro from him took a lot.
31:23I would send him copy along the way, and he would edit me.
31:27I have an Edgerton binder that has sticky notes and things that he wrote back to me.
31:33I have one that sticks out that in my mind, he wrote, look what I found.
31:42And it's some notes that I needed to know for whatever I was researching.
31:46And so being a Southern sage, he had an intimacy and a knowledge of the South that helped me shape what I was learning.
31:55And there were times that we actually quibbled.
31:58He would say, well, honey, I know that's what it looks like, but I don't think that that's true.
32:04I don't think people really intended thus and so.
32:08And then I would come back with more evidence, and he would humbly say, all right, now you've got your story.
32:15You've found the truth.
32:18So I begged and pleaded for him to write that intro for maybe a year.
32:26And he kept saying, I'll think about it.
32:29I don't want my name to overshadow your name.
32:32As the book came together, and I think what he saw was that it was going to be able to stand on its own without him, then he was willing to give it to me.
32:42We were attending actually the reunion of one of the reunions of the SFA group in Birmingham.
32:50And again, he goes into his briefcase and hands me a manila folder and says, I got something for you, and hands me this intro.
32:59Oh, wow.
33:01Yeah, it was devastating to lose him.
33:03Well, it's a beautiful intro, and it certainly holds up all these years later.
33:11I hadn't read it since the book came out, and it's beautifully done.
33:15All right, Tony, I want to talk about some of your books.
33:21And you mentioned the Juke Joints and Jazz Clubs and Juice, which came out last year.
33:28It's been nominated for an IACP award.
33:32I'm sure it's probably got more awards in its future.
33:36What's a discovery that you made in researching that book that was particularly exciting to you?
33:44Oh, there were so many.
33:45But one of the primary surprises to me was to first discover not just that African-Americans in the 18th century had been store owners, shopkeeps, restaurateurs.
34:08You know, they had owned businesses.
34:11But that there were some of those merchants that had inventories that were extremely high value.
34:20I didn't take time to understand the business of that era.
34:23I left that for the next generation to study.
34:27But it was fascinating to me to discover a couple of these men who owned these incredible stores in the north where there were luxury goods on the shelves, beautiful Madeiras and wines and lobster and all kinds of caviar, I believe.
34:46But there was an element of excellence and elegance within this community of sales folks.
34:56But what was even more fun was to learn that one of them handed to the next generation the business to his daughter.
35:04And in her interpretation, she also shared the passion that I do.
35:10And her business became a central location for people who were interested in integration.
35:18And her bakery, her catering business serviced both communities and sometimes together.
35:25And that was really lovely to discover them.
35:28What was her name?
35:28And they are the Remond, the Remond, John Remond, and his daughter is Sally.
35:37And they were in Rhode Island, I believe.
35:40That was a fun discovery.
35:41Well, and as you said, there's so many more in that book.
35:45It's really fun.
35:48And particularly for someone who loves cocktails like I do.
35:53So I want to get back to when Southern women cook for a second.
35:56And I want to ask you about a woman named Emily Meggett, who came out with a bestselling cookbook called Gullah Geechee Home Cooking toward the end of her life.
36:12And she passed away just a year or two ago.
36:16And there's a story in there about you making Hop and John with her.
36:20And I'm just wondering if you could share a bit of that.
36:22Well, you know, with me, there's always a story.
36:24And there's never a direct answer to the direct question.
36:29So bear with me.
36:31During those years in the South, I kept hearing about a woman in Edisto.
36:35There's this woman over there.
36:37And she makes this incredible red rice.
36:38But nobody could follow through and tell me her name.
36:43I'm not from there.
36:44And the Gullah Geechee, prior to recent years, that was a very closed community.
36:50I think only Pat Conroy and maybe only a few others penetrated and learned about the intimacies of their legacy.
37:01And so it was impossible for me to figure out from a distance who this woman was.
37:05And several years ago, in the relationship that I developed with B.J. Dennis, who was a chef, caterer, and carrier of the Gullah Geechee food culture, he mentioned her to me.
37:23And I flew down to the area.
37:29I started making connections.
37:32And she wasn't well or she wasn't available or something.
37:35So he took me to meet other women.
37:37And then I got a phone call from her family telling me that she had this archive of recipes and that they wanted to help put them together as she was aging.
37:46And I didn't think I was the right person for that work.
37:52But I asked one thing if I would help them in the process if someday she would cook with me.
37:58I didn't want my name attached to her book.
38:01I felt what John felt for me.
38:05She had been obscure, but she was well-known in her area.
38:08And I wanted her to have her identity.
38:12So I recommended a young up-and-coming journalist, Kayla Stewart, to capture her story because Kayla had interviewed me several times and had done a really accurate job of telling my story.
38:24So I thought she was someone they could trust.
38:26They ultimately made their own decision.
38:27People sent them lots of people.
38:30But I didn't want a shadow.
38:32I didn't want to have any cause any shadow on her legacy.
38:37But I asked them if I could cook with her later.
38:41And so we were filming in the region for our Cook's Country video series on the road.
38:49And I tagged along.
38:51And true to her form, she stands at the door to the side entrance of her home.
38:59And she welcomes you no matter how she's feeling.
39:02And then she makes sure that everyone feels at home.
39:08So once we started cooking together, Kim Severson also cooked with her.
39:12But we've talked about it.
39:14And maybe she felt a little bit more familiar because I'm also African-American.
39:20I don't know.
39:20But my staff was having the most fun watching her sort of, not bark at me, but like very motherly.
39:29Like, just give me that one over there.
39:30And don't do it like that.
39:31And you need to cut it this way.
39:33And do that.
39:33Hold it this way.
39:34Let me show you.
39:35And, you know, she's in the sink with you.
39:36And it was very maternalistic.
39:39And at the end, after we've created the meal together, we sat together and she said grace over the meal.
39:47And I wept.
39:48Like, I just could not keep myself together.
39:51Because other than the women that I knew through Southern Foodways Alliance, like Verda Mae Grosvenor, the noted authors, Verda Mae, Leah Chase, Edna Lewis, who are amazing women.
40:05But Emily Meggett was an on-the-ground representation of the women I had been looking for all along.
40:17And so she also has a very special place in my heart.
40:23I want to ask you about one more recipe.
40:28And it's something called Porter Plum Pudding Layer Cake, which is a mouthful.
40:37And we're having an event in December called Illumination Charleston.
40:42And you're going to come to the event, which I'm very excited about, and talk about this recipe.
40:48And the event is kind of a kickoff for the holidays in the low country.
40:53And this cake is a showstopper.
40:59I mean, it's the kind of thing that you would bring out on a very special occasion like the holidays.
41:05Tell me a little bit about the story behind this one and your connection to it.
41:10Well, this is one of the instances where Morgan, my executive editor, and I came together with a shared passion to tell a true story.
41:22This recipe began as a reference to a recipe in St. Louis.
41:28It's a very familiar recipe, Jefferson Davis pie, which is basically a raisin-based.
41:36Really?
41:37It's called Jefferson Davis pie?
41:39Oh, yeah.
41:39And so we had it in our archive, again, as Morgan's going through all of this stuff.
41:45And we had this in the archive.
41:47And she does a little research and finds out that a newspaper, shortly after this recipe comes out in the 40s or whenever it was,
41:56the mistress of the house acknowledges that the caterer, the woman who makes this recipe,
42:02just didn't have, you know, she didn't have a name for this raisin pie, but everybody was making raisin pie at the time.
42:07And so the mistress names it Jefferson Davis pie.
42:13And she does something that was really important to me, which is part of my work, which is she names the cook.
42:19So really stuck in Morgan's cross.
42:24She was just wanting me to, you know, run it in the magazine and give the credit back to the real woman who deserved the name of this pie.
42:33But this is a colossally old-fashioned pie.
42:37If you think about pecan pie, which everybody loves, and fruitcake, like raisins were a really important commodity at a point in history.
42:49So we can see why people would have made a pie this way.
42:54But today there was no way we could just – we even tried.
42:57We had the test cooks at Cook's Country remake it with their wisdom, right?
43:04How would you update this?
43:06What would you do to improve it?
43:07And about the same time, I met the great-great-granddaughter of one of these caterer women, type women, from Charleston.
43:22And I knew about her grandmother because I had written about her in the same way that I had written about the daughter in Rhode Island, who descended from a family of proficient caterers that were in high demand.
43:39So when someone introduced me to Robin, Robin never said.
43:43She just said, I'm an aspiring writer.
43:45I really follow you, blah, blah, blah.
43:47And some way or another, eventually, it did come out that she was Eliza Seymour's great-great-great-granddaughter.
43:55And every time I went to Charleston to visit Natalie, whatever I was doing there, I went to this house on Trad Street.
44:04And I would stand there and just look through the gate.
44:09And it was not that uncommon.
44:10I'd do that in whatever city.
44:12I'd go to visit plantations.
44:14I'd go to shops if I could find them.
44:17Now, somebody once asked me, are these cooks haunting you?
44:22And I wouldn't say it was a haunting, but I really feel their spirits.
44:28And I would stand there in front of that house.
44:30And when I told Robin that, she said, well, we have the original recipe.
44:36And it turns out it wasn't a pie.
44:38It was a plum pudding would be more like what you would call it, an old English steamed pudding.
44:45So we went back to the test kitchen, and Morgan said, I got it.
44:49It's like carrot cake.
44:51All the same spices, all of that rich dried fruit, the warmth of the spices.
44:56And we came with this spectacularly beautiful cake that, as you say, is definitely a showstopper and intended to be the centerpiece of a holiday table.
45:07And it's really not that hard to make.
45:10I think the hardest part of it is to soak the raisins overnight in porter, which initially confounded the team.
45:18Like, you can penetrate and imbue dried fruit with flavor in an hour.
45:23You don't have to soak it overnight.
45:24But if you trace back to the history of this process with the raisins back then, the dry fruit sat for several days to make fruit cake.
45:36Lastly, the other element here is that I think what Robin started to tell me was about the porter company that had made the beer company that had made a porter in her name using those same warm spices.
45:49So that was the initial trigger, was like, oh, well, maybe I can do a story about them, and they valued her, and it's still not about me.
45:58And ultimately, Morgan took care of it for me.
46:04Well, it's a stunner of a cake.
46:06And it's a beautiful-looking thing, as folks will see when they buy your book.
46:12And if you like carrot cake, that is what it will remind you of.
46:15It's just that there are no carrots in it.
46:18But that's exactly what it will remind you of.
46:22Well, Tony, I just have one more question for you.
46:27You may not have been born in the South, but you certainly have spent a lot of time there and here.
46:37And it's defined so much of your career and your journey.
46:42What does it mean to you to be Southern?
46:44How about that?
46:45It's so cool.
46:47It's so cool that that 70 contributors are my sisters.
46:52There is a sisterhood that was created when they embraced me by being vulnerable.
47:02And it allowed me to really explore parts of myself that were lost and hurting.
47:10In those early years, I wouldn't participate in some of the activities that SFA conducted.
47:16Like there's a pimento cheese book, and I wouldn't add a recipe or deviled eggs or something.
47:22Because I just didn't feel like I was Southern and that my recipe would seem different than what everyone was looking for.
47:31And now I understand that being Southern is a hybrid.
47:36It's a state of mind, as Morgan says in her introduction to this book.
47:39Because the region is so vast and so diverse that Texas is a portion of the South as much as Florida is.
47:47And yet they have their own unique identities, too.
47:52And so it's given me the comfort to know that I can be from Southern California, but I can also express my love for a region and for a people.
47:59And try to do my part to give them back the dignity that has been robbed from them, from people who seek to divide us in order to maintain power and economic superiority.
48:23If we all came together, we would outnumber that class.
48:27And they know that.
48:28And so this work, ultimately, as a self-taught historian, I read so much about American history and Southern history and women's history and food history.
48:42And that was the thought that I maintained the entire time was someone doesn't want us to be together.
48:52And I wanted to change that.
48:54Well, you're certainly doing that.
48:56And you're doing it in a beautiful way.
48:58And congrats on the book.
49:00All the books.
49:01I can't even keep up with the books.
49:04And Toni Tipton Martin, thanks so much for being on Biscuits and Jam.
49:08Thank you for having me.
49:09And I'm looking forward to seeing you in Charleston.
49:11That is a fact.
49:12I can't wait.