American Culinary Histories

Renowned essayist Matthew Gavin Frank takes readers on a richly illustrated culinary tour of the United States through fifty signature dishes, and a radical exploration of our gastronomic heritage, in The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food (W.W. Norton). From key lime pie (Florida) to elk stew (Montana), The Mad Feast commemorates the unexpected origins of the familiar. Brazenly dissecting the myriad intersections between history and food, Frank, in this gorgeously designed volume, considers politics, sexuality, violence, grief, and pleasure: the cool, creamy whoopie pie evokes toughness in the face of New England winters, while the stewlike perloo serves up an exploration of food and race in the South.

Nora Pouillon opened Restaurant Nora in 1979 with her partners, brothers Thomas and Steven Damato. In 1999 Restaurant Nora became the first certified organic restaurant in the United States. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the first Genesis Award from Women Chefs and Restaurateurs. An IACP Cookbook Awards finalist, Nora is a tireless advocate for nutritionally wholesome food and a sustainable, health-focused. Her memoir, My Organic Life: How A Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today (Knopf) is the story of an unheralded culinary pioneer who made it her mission to bring delicious, wholesome foods to the American table. My Organic Life encompasses the birth of the farm-to-table movement, the proliferation of greenmarkets across the country, and the evolution of the chef into social advocate. Spanning the last forty years of our relationship with food, this is a deeply personal, powerfully felt story of the organic revolution—by the unlikely heroine at its forefront.

Toni Tipton-Martin is co-author of A Taste of Heritage: The New African American Cuisine, contributor to Culinaria: The United States, and editor of a new edition of The Blue Grass Cook Book by Minnie C. Fox. Her latest book is The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (University of Texas Press). Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors. The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights.