African American Books - Page 5

The African-American Kitchen: Food for Body and Soul (African Diaspora)

George Erdosh

Amazon Price: $26.50 List Price: $26.50 Usually ships in 1 to 4 weeks By: Rosen Publishing Group Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $0.01

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Editorial Review:

Describes the influences on and the evolution of African-American cooking. Includes recipes and suggestions for healthy cooking.

The African-American Kitchen: Cooking from Our Heritage

Angela Shelf Medearis

List Price: $17.00 By: Plume Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $3.05

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the gumbos of Louisiana to the Carolina rice islands, from the introduction of pasta to the rise of the ubiquitous peanut, African-American cooks have placed an indelible stamp on American food. Angela Shelf Medearis has collected more than 250 treasured recipes, including native African dishes, Caribbean-influenced foods, Southern and soul food staples, and contemporary favorites, all testifying to the exciting variety of this abundant tradition. From Africa come Ghanaian Kelewele, (spicy plantain fritters) and Ethiopian Yemiser Selatta, a lentil salad. From the Caribbean, Jamaican Stamp and Go codfish cakes and Haitian Griots, savory marinated chunks of pork. Out of the slave quarters and plantation kitchens where African cooks presided, we get Hoppin' John, Ham with Red-Eye Gravy, Beaten Biscuits, and Peach Cobbler. For holidays and celebrations, there are special menus including Kwanzaa Blessing Soup and Christmas Molasses Taffy, as well as time-honored treats from church socials and family reunions like Picnic Potato Salad, Raisin-Pecan Pie, and much, much more. The text is enlivened with African and Southern sayings, quotations from 19th-century cooks' manuals, and personal and family reminiscences, all bringing the rich African-American culinary heritage to life. The African-American Kitchen is packed with the traditions of generations of cooks who have always created and preserved their culture through food and the families it nourishes. More than a cookbook, it is a living history and a loving testament of pride.

Rappers' Delights : African-American Cookin' With Soul

Al Pereira

List Price: $16.95 By: Universe Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $1.74

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fabulous photos and funny recipes 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Rappers' Delight is a great cookbook for novice chefs--especially kids. The rappers represented are mostly old school, but the photos are timeless. There's a great deal of humour in this book, in the photographs, the commentary, and the recipes themselves. The personality of each performer is conveyed in his or her contribution, and the author is good-natured and well-versed in rap history. This book makes a wonderful gift for anyone interested in either rap or quick and easy American cooking.

In good taste 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Reading this book made my mouth water. I can't wait to try out some of the recipes. The photos of all my favorite artists are phat!

An unique cookbook with a saucy slant 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Al Pereira's writing style and photographic genius has created a hip hop Joy of Cooking for the '90's. A must for any one who is a scholar of older rap or good food.

Editorial Review:

Hip-hop culture comes to the kitchen with this collection of more than 40 recipes that provides a tasty mix of treats. From Queen Latifah's "Royal Turkey Cutlets" and Flavor Flav's "Rice Pilaf" to Patra's "Island Snapper", the creative spirit woven through rap music reverberates in these dishes. 30 illustrations.

The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook/Health Conscious Recipes & Food Memories: Healthy Conscious Recipes & Food Memories

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Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

List Price: $8.00 By: Ballantine Books Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $14.45

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

There's one thing you can say for sure about Vertamae -- she does her thing her way. And in spite of what she says, she always gives ample instruction on how to create her tasty dishes. But the recipes are just part of the immense appeal of this memoir-cookbook, all of it as sassy as Vertamae herself.

The other part is the people you'll meet and get to know: Estella Smart ("Mother Dear"), Vertamae's paternal grandmother and creator of Mountain Oysters; Uncle Costen, who lived to be 112 and knew how to make Harriet Tubman Ragout; and Archie Shepp, responsible for Collard Greens a la Shepp, just to name a few. You'll also hear about how poundcake got Vertamae a marriage proposal (she didn't accept), how she ate the best barbecued chicken ever at the Jimmy Carter White House with Ed Bradley, and how she perfected her omelettes in Paris, her enchiladas in New Mexico, her biscuits in Mississippi and her Vatapa in Brazil.

Best of all, you will become familiar with the rich variety of African-American cookery while listening to the voice of one of the true original storytellers of our time or any other.

The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro: The Classic Year-Round Celebration of Black Heritage from Emancipation Proclamation Breakfast Cake to Wandering Pilgrim's Stew

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the organization that brought us The Black Family Reunion cookbooks comes The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, a fun, richly brewed collection of recipes, historical facts, photos, and personal anecdotes. First published in 1958 by the National Council of Negro Women, it includes contributions from members in thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia and offers exceptional insight into American history and the African-American community at the time of its publication. As John Hope Franklin (whose own family owns a copy of the book) points out, much of the cultural information in the cookbook has never been passed down to successive generations.

Arranged according to the calendar year, the cookbook opens with a cake to be baked in celebration of both New Year's Day and the Emancipation Proclamation. Scattered among the recipes one finds excerpts from documents such as the Gettysburg Address and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Tributes to well-known figures like Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington appear alongside brief bios and recipes in celebration of important but obscured figures. This delightful collection of delicious recipes helps us commemorate African-American history throughout the year.

Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (Race and American Culture)

Doris Witt

Amazon Price: $98.00 List Price: $98.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $23.91

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Editorial Review:

The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life.
Taking as her focus the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when soul food emerged as a pivotal emblem of white radical chic and black bourgeois authenticity, Witt explores how this interracial celebration of previously stigmatized foods such as chitterlings and watermelon was linked to the contemporaneous vilification of black women as slave mothers. By positioning African American women at the nexus of debates over domestic servants, black culinary history, and white female body politics, Black Hunger demonstrates why the ongoing narrative of white fascination with blackness demands increased attention to the internal dynamics of sexuality, gender, class, and religion in African American culture.
Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.

New Soul Cooking: Updating a Cuisine Rich in Flavor and Tradition (Melting Pot)

Tanya Holland

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Soul food embodies the best of American cooking-it's tasty, homegrown, and redolent of the country's multiethnic history. In New Soul Cooking, the Food Network's Tanya Holland redefines this much-loved cuisine, introducing fresh and healthy ingredients, modern cooking styles, and global flavors.

From Africa to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South, Holland shows how African flavors fused with existing cooking traditions created the basis for soul food. She combines this now traditional style with fresh flavor combinations and cooking techniques, to create soul food cooking for a new generation of home cooks and chefs.

The 90 delicious creations in New Soul Cooking-from Black-eyed Pea and Country Ham Chowder to Pecan-Crusted Boneless Chicken Breasts and Confetti Cornbread-reinvigorate the concept of soul food. Luscious color photographs of many of these dishes introduce new presentation ideas, reinforcing Holland's belief that a color palette is as important as a wonderful flavor palate.

Vertamae Cooks Again: More Recipes from the Americas' Family Kitchen

Vertamae Grosvenor

List Price: $19.95 By: Bay Books Amazon Marketplace: 42 new & used starting at $1.45

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Subtitled More Recipes from the Americas' Family Kitchen, Vertamae Grosvenor's Vertamae Cooks Again is a companion cookbook to the author's public television show of the same name. It's an exploration, if you will, of pan-American comfort food.

"You can grow up," Grosvenor relates, "leave your home, travel far, change your walk, your talk, your name, but you--your people, your roots--will always be known by the language you cry in. That's the language of home.... I think that the natural truth is: That home language is about food." This, then, is a book of home food from all over the Americas, a lot of it old and traditional, some of it new, a mixing of cultural influences. To a traditional black-eyed pea soup from Nassau, for example, there's the addition of potato gnocchi. The original soup Grosvenor tasted featured dumplings. The gnocchi, like the coconut milk in the recipe, are her own additions. And such is the freewheeling style of this book, touching down here and there for a taste of this and that, all of it a rich mix redolent of someone's home cooking somewhere.

Vertamae Cooks Again is divided into soups, salads, side dishes and breads, entrees, and desserts and beverages. Recipes include the likes of Carolina Minestrone (rice instead of pasta), Afro-Mexican Radish Salad, Grilled Tuna and Vegetable Salad, Haitian Red Beans and Rice, Corn on the Cob with Chili Butter, Baked Jerked Chicken, Roast Chicken with Banana Stuffing, Pozole, Griot, Vegetable Pot Pies with Mashed Potato Crust, Applesauce Cake, and Tres Leche (Three Milk Cake).

Hit the road with Vertamae and you may find yourself traveling back home to the foods that feel good. --Schuyler Ingle

The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories from the National Council of Negro Women, Inc

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