texasmesquite

Soul Collection

By Ashley Boyd Staff Writer
Source: Tuscaloosa News
Published: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 4:57 p.m.
african american cookbook collection
(Tuscaloosa News/Michael E. Palmer)
A few of the cookbooks from the David Walker Lupton collection are seen here Friday July 18, 2008 in the William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library in Tuscaloosa.
The University of Alabama's acquisition of one of the world's largest African-American cookbook collections did more than bring food to Alabama.
The growing collection catalogues more than a century of African-American cuisine and culture. Tracing the roots of the soul food movement and beyond, the collection contains more than 450 titles with recipes from African food diasporas — past and present.
According to Louis Pitschmann, dean of the UA Libraries, the reprint version of 'What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking,' published in 1881, features recipes by a former Alabama slave and was thought to have been the earliest publication by an African-American chef until Malinda Russell's cookbook 'A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen,' originally published in 1866, came to light. The Lupton collection's reprinted version of Russell's book offers valuable insight into the life and influences of this African-American chef in the 1800s.
'Cookbooks are widely accepted among scholars both as documents of history and works with literary interest,' said Elaine Martin, a professor of German and authority on food in film and literature. 'Their study can illuminate the lives of people in new and innovative ways.'
According to Jessica Lacher-Feldman, the outreach services coordinator for the W.S. Hoole Special Collection Library at UA, the collection is David Lupton's effort to create a comprehensive bibliography of culinary literature that reflects the diversity of African-American culture and highlights differences in regional cooking. Lupton, a distant cousin of former UA president Nathaniel Lupton, decided UA was the ideal place to donate his collection because of its location, and after his death Lupton's widow authorized the collection's transfer.
'Culinary texts yield far more than recipes when closely scrutinized. They are written from the point of view of an individual or a community and, as such, have much to stay about ethnic identity, family and community life, social history, the roles of women and men, values, religion, and economics, as well as the more obvious fields of diet and nutrition, use of agricultural products, the food supply, and general food history,' Lacher-Feldman said.
The titles alone give a sense of the diversity of subjects, according to Lacher-Feldman.
'They are big glossy coffee table cookbooks and some very small minimal publications that were meant to serve as fundraisers for community groups and everything in between,' Feldman said.
The collection includes books that depict the African-American chefs who worked behind the scenes as domestic servants in the world's finest restaurants, hotels, clubs and dining cars. The facsimile edition of 'Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus: A Collection of Practical Recipes for Preparing Meats, Game, Fowl, Fish, Puddings, Pastries, etc.,' tells the story of Rufus Estes who first worked on a dining car before becoming the head chef of U.S. Steel Corporation. A reprinted version of the 1958 'The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro,' published by The National Council of Negro Women links cooking with African American social history.
'I think that a lot of the earliest cookbooks reflect African-American culinary history in the sense that African-Americans were providing elegant food in hotels and clubs and restaurants. These books reflect more about domestic service and the professional life of an African-American chef. As time progresses, the later cookbooks reflect the diversity in culture,' Lacher-Feldman said.
Also included in the collection are a number of celebrity cookbooks ranging from 'Rapper's Delight: African American Cookin' with Soul,' published in 1998, in which rappers reveal their favorite recipes, including Queen Latifah's recipe for Royal Turkey Cutlets and Flavor Flav's Rice Pilaf to 'The Presley Family Cookbook,' which lists recipes for Peanut Butter Sandwiches and Duck Dressing. Other celebrity cookbooks include 'Cooking for the Champ,' a cookbook published in 1979 and compiled by Muhammad Ali's chef Lana Shabaaz, as well as cookbooks by Pearl Bailey, Johnny Mathis, Patti LaBelle, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Seale and Nat King Cole.
'I am also really excited about the cookbooks no one ever thought would have made it to a special collections library, cookbooks done for fundraisers, for churches and social groups — very limited publications that say so much about a specific point in time and place,' Lacher-Feldman said.
She adds that with every cookbook, it's important to understand why the recipes were put together and what each says about a specific community. The beauty of the collection is in its diversity, Lacher-Feldman said, adding that library officials are interested in contributions from the public, because they are eager to continue adding to it.
'The diversity reflects the fact that there are so many different people doing so many different things all over the country,' Lacher-Feldman said. 'There are books published in Los Angeles, books published in Alabama and around the South, and everywhere in between. It is really about American culinary history.'