The Holiday Tables

The holiday table in the United States is a layered inheritance, and Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee places African American cooks at the centre of it. Her book gathers recipes from cookbooks written and compiled by Black authors over more than a century, and it corrects a record that long presented the work of Black cooks as instinct, never as authorship. The holiday tables of the South, and in time of the whole country, were laid in large part by those cooks, many of them enslaved or only recently freed, who planned, seasoned and served the feasts of others before setting their own.

The feast days of the American year, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and the celebrations of Emancipation, share a grammar of abundance. A table is judged by its range as much as by any single dish: a roasted bird or a baked ham at the head, then vegetables cooked long and seasoned with smoked pork, breads, pickles and preserves, and at the end a long row of cakes and pies. Jubilee shows that this abundance rested on technical skill and on written method, and that Black cookbook authors recorded the proportions, the oven management and the order of service that such a table demanded. The sweet end of the table carries much of the tradition. Layered cakes, pound cakes built on a measure of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, sweet potato pies and pecan pies, made with the native pecan, Carya illinoinensis, appear on holiday tables across the South and beyond. These were labour-intensive preparations, and their presence marked an occasion. Tipton-Martin's recipes, drawn from the books of Black cooks and caterers, treat them as professional work: the creaming of butter and sugar, the care over the egg, the judgement of an oven without a thermostat. The savoury centre varies by region and household. Ham cured in the Upland South, roast turkey, and in Louisiana the dressing and the gumbo each hold a place, while greens, macaroni baked with cheese, and cornbread dressing recur widely on African American tables. The dishes carry memory as well as flavour, and the cook who prepares them is usually continuing a method received from an older relative. The written books Jubilee surveys show that this transmission was not only oral, since Black authors set it down for pupils, households and congregations. The holiday table also served as an institution of gathering. Churches, families and neighbourhoods used the feast to mark seasons and freedoms, and the labour of preparing it was shared, often across several days. In the course of the twentieth century these tables passed into the national idea of the holiday meal, so that dishes first made by Black cooks came to be read as simply American. The corrective in Jubilee is to restore the names and the authorship, and to read the holiday table as a body of skill with a documented line of makers.

The flavour of the holiday table is built on slow cooking, smoked pork in the greens, sweetness in the cakes and pies, and the richness of butter, eggs and cheese. Salt, smoke, sugar and spice are set against one another across the plates, so that a single meal moves from the savoury and the pickled to the deeply sweet. The seasoning is deliberate and learned, and it is what the written recipes in Jubilee preserve.