ABSTRACT
This essay is a consideration of the African-American tradition of cookbook publishing. It begins with a discussion of cookbooks issued in the last twenty years by a former Black Panther and a former pop singer among others, and ends with Abby Fisher's What Mrs Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, a recipe collection which in 1881 became one of the first to be published by an African American. 1 What emerges in the course of this overview is that African-American cookbook writers very often imbue their recipes with an oral quality. As we shall see, otherwise disparate African-American cookbook writers very often infuse their prose with new coinages, with improvised formulations and deliberate informalities, that seem to sign and to simulate the distinctive patterning of black vernacular speech. But this overview also contends that the impulse and bid to capture orality is not the exclusive preserve of black cookbook writers, but rather one that draws upon and contributes to a longstanding tradition in which African-American literary artists of all types have sought new ways of writing the vernacular.
