Career
Tipton-Martin started at the Los Angeles Times as a nutrition reporter in 1983. [1] [2] She has written that Freda DeKnight's 1948 A Date With A Dish: A Cookbook of American Negro Recipes, which recognized that not all African American cooking was rural Southern food or soul food, was an early influence during this period. [3]
Ruth Reichl became food editor at the Times in 1990 and encouraged Tipton-Martin to expand into food journalism. [1] She moved to the Cleveland Plain Dealer as food editor in 1991, where she was the first Black person to serve as editor of a food section for a major U.S. newspaper. [4] [5] She was at the Plain Dealer for five years. [1]
Tipton-Martin took a two-decade long hiatus from full-time work in the industry to raise her children, but did freelance writing and editing. [1]
When she re-entered full time work, she took a took a seminar at Radcliffe College that explored the "methodology of interpreting a cookbook author’s words and meanings". She wrote essays about cookbooks written by African American and Black writers. [1]
She was named editor in chief for Cook's Country in 2020, replacing former editor Tucker Shaw. [2] [4] She does a segment on each episode on the history of the episode's featured dish from the parlor of her Baltimore home. [5]
Tipton-Martin's books focus on African American culinary history, and as part of the work involved in writing them, Tipton-Martin researched various historical cookbooks by Black Americans. [6] [7] As of 2022 she had collected around 450 cookbooks written by African Americans. [1] One of her first acquisitions was Eliza's Cook Book (1936). The oldest book in her collection is The House Servant's Directory (1827). [1]
Her 2015 The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks explored the expertise of 19th and 20th century African American professional chefs and cookbook writers, some of whom were enslaved or emancipated. [1] She self-published The Jemima Code as a blog after presenting it to an agent who "disappeared with her proposal" and being told there was no market for the book, which Tipton-Martin attributes to it "not [conforming] to the soul food only story". [6]
Her 2019 Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking continued the exploration of the historical cookbooks, this time focusing on the recipes, which she created modern interpretations of and presented side-by-side, and the chefs who created them. [1] [7] Serious Eats said it 'reverses the idea that all Black American foodways are "Southern" or "soul food" ' or that all African American cooking was the food of poverty. [7] [8]
Her 2023 Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: Cocktails from Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks focuses on how African American mixologists influenced American cocktail culture and discusses the history of juke joints. [9] [10] [11] Jessica B. Harris said that what Tipton-Martin had done with the book "is essentially create a mixologist’s parallel to what she did in ‘Jubilee' ". [12] VinePair said it continued Jubilee's "journey through the lens of drinks and the Black bartenders who have helped pave the nation’s cocktail culture". [8]
She appeared in an episode of High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America in which she discussed how the food marketing industry has used images of Black people. [5]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
