For sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport, every month is a good time to read about Black food. As the owners of Brooklyn’s BEM | books & more, the country’s first book store to focus on the topic, the two sisters are regularly curating works that narrate and elevate stories and memories about Black food.
“Black history, for us, is a year-round affair,” said Gabrielle. “In terms of things we’re reading, it’s always exciting to see how history shows up throughout the collection.”
For Black History Month, the two are revisiting cookbooks, poetry, essays and memoirs that highlight the role of food in Black culture and liberation. From texts like Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which examines the intersection of the fight for racial justice and the fate of Black businesses like McDonald’s franchises; to The Ideal Bartender 1917 Reprint, a recipe book highlighting early 20th-century cocktails from the Black bartender Tom Bullock; to At the Table of Power: Food and Cuisine in the African American Struggle for Freedom, Justice, and Equality, which examines the role of food in the fight for freedom and equality, the bookshop owners remind readers that there are many types of texts that stimulate taste buds while re-creating and often challenging perceptions about race and identity.
The Guardian sat with the sisters to learn more about five books they’ve been reading during Black History Month and beyond.
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America,
by Jessica B Harris
When customers come to BEM asking what to read to learn more about Black foodways, Gabrielle and Danielle usually point them to High on the Hog. It’s one of the most significant pieces of writing by the culinary historian and cookbook author Dr Jessica B Harris, and helped express and reorient findings about food in the Black diaspora. Published in 2011, the book was later transformed into a docuseries on Netflix and has already been picked up for a new season.
“We should always be revisiting and talking about [High on the Hog],” says Gabrielle. “It really is the foundational text of studying Black foodways in the US.”
Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen,
by George McCalman
Illustrated Black History, which came out last fall, is a vivid book that profiles many Black Americans from a range of professions, backgrounds and cultures around the world. Biographies are paired with bright illustrations, created by George McCalman, who also illustrated and designed Bryant Terry’s Black Food.
“It’s a really beautiful book – it’s got gorgeous illustrations and essays on each of the folks highlighted and there are so many culinary folks among the different figures profiled,” said Danielle. In the book, figures like Cato Alexander, considered the first celebrity bartender in the US, and James Hemings, once enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and the first American chef to train in France, are remembered in stunning, colorful detail.
The book features names familiar and perhaps not. “It’s a really beautiful mix of figures we should know about and it’s also just a beautiful book,” says Gabrielle. “It’s really striking.”
The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks,
by Toni Tipton-Martin
Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code remains integral in both scope and intrigue. The food historian and current editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country documents more than 150 Black cookbooks across two centuries of Black American cooking, debunking reductive myths about Black cuisine, and reiterating the central role African Americans have played in American foodways.
“Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code is a wonderful orientation to the history of Black cookbooks and an important part of our collection,” says Danielle. “It’s a really beautiful book about cookbooks. The way it’s put together, it’s so gorgeous. You get a sense of the legacy of 200 years of African American cookbooks published here in the US. And a few of them we carry, like Rufus Estes’ Good Things to Eat from the late 1800s, or What Mrs Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking.”
Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People,
by Kekla Magoon
The sisters also point to Revolution in Our Time as a way to learn about the Black Panther Party and its free breakfast program, which inspired free food programs in public schools that continue today.
“We have a couple of different books that focus on the Panthers – thinking about the free breakfast program as one of the pillars and just the way that they conceptualize meeting our material needs and food, in particular, as being such an important part of the mission and the work,” said Danielle. “There are really beautiful photographs, the writing is wonderful and clear and accessible, and doesn’t shy away from the historical realities but also presents it in a way that’s really suitable for [young] readers.”
The Black Book,
foreword and preface by Toni Morrison,
edited by Middleton A Harris
There are numerous texts that demonstrate Toni Morrison’s genius and contributions to American literature. The Black Book, which takes an encyclopedic look at the Black American experience from 1619 through the 1940s, is especially compelling to the sisters.
Morrison and editor Middleton A Harris “went on a deep archival dive to create a compendium of the Black experience from 1619 to 1974 – when they were doing this work. I haven’t seen another book put together in this way”, says Gabrielle.
A massive collection of articles, images, theater posters, abolition proclamations and more, this work – spearheaded by Morrison, Harris and a team of collectors – helps illustrate more than 300 years of the Black experience through elements such as politics, family and culture.
Gabrielle says she was particularly engrossed by seeing an article about Margaret Garner, a woman whose 1856 trial for infanticide was documented in newspapers during that time. Morrison found the article while researching for the book that ultimately became the inspiration for Beloved, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.
Danielle said that “food shows up in more subtle ways” throughout the book.
“You see imagery of watermelon, or you have the cakewalk,” she said. “But as you flip through, you’re able to trace some of the ways that it shapes other aspects of culture and history, and all of what the Black experience can be, has been – there’s a lot that it touches in really beautiful ways.”
