The creators of The Black Family Reunion Cookbook now offer recipes for wonderful dishes that capture all the down-home Southern flavor--but provide only minimal salt and fat. Uplifting anecdotes by Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, complement the recipes. Illustrations.

Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking

The Black Family Reunion Celebrations, organized by The National Council of Negro Women and held in seven cities across America every summer, celebrate and preserve the values, traditions, and strengths of the African-American family. Inspired by these festivals, The Black Family Reunion Cookbook contains more than 250 recipes from home kitchens across America, seasoned with warm memories and “homemade love.” Including personal reminiscences from celebrities such as Natalie Cole, Wilma Rudolph, Patti LaBelle, and Spelman College President Johnnetta Cole, this unique collection reflects the local, national, and international heritage of the Black community. It offers dishes for every occasion and every taste, from African-inspired Mustard Greens with Peanut Sauce to down-home Family Famous Chicken and Dumplings, from a traditional gumbo to sophisticated Sweet Potato Smoked Turkey Bisque, and, in honor of the council's founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, her own recipe for her celebrated Sweet Potato Pie.

A series of fascinating chapters analyze cookery books through the ages. From the convenience-food cookbooks of the 1950s, to the 1980s rise in 'white trash' cookbooks, and the surprise success of the Two Fat Ladies books from the 1990s, leading author Sherrie Inness discusses how women have used such books over the years to protest social norms.

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.

From Catfish Stew and Rice to Hoppin' John-Peas and Plenty to Mary McLeod Bethune's Sweet Potato Pie, this unique volume honors the influence of African-American mothers in 200 favorite family recipes.

A stunning celebration and reappraisal of the importance of “women’s work,” Made from Scratch addresses the tug that many Americans feel between our professional and private lives. In this stunning celebration and reappraisal of the importance of "women's work," acclaimed journalist Jean Zimmerman poignantly addresses the tug that many Americans of the twenty-first century feel between our professional and private lives. With sharp wit and intelligence, she offers evidence that in the current domestic vacuum, we still long for a richer home life -- a paradox visible in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, in the continuing popularity of women's service magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Ladies' Home Journal -- whose combined circulation of over 17 million is nearly twice the combined circulation of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report -- and the booming business of restorations, where onlookers get a hands-on view of domestic life as it flourished in past centuries. This book is about the ways home traditions passed from one generation to the next -- baking a birthday cake from scratch, cherishing family heirlooms, or discovering the satisfaction of piecing a quilt -- sustain our souls, especially in our ever more processed, synthetic world, where we buy "homemade" goods and fail to see the irony in that. Made from Scratch tells the story of the unsung heroines of the hearth, investigating the history of female domesticity and charting its cultural changes over centuries. Zimmerman traces the lives of her own family's homemakers -- from her tiny but indomitable grandmother, who managed a farm, strangled chickens with her bare hands, and sewed all the family clothing, to her mother, who rejected her country upbringing yet kept a fastidious suburban home where the gender divide stayed firmly in place, to her own experiences as a wife and mother weaned on the Women's Movement of the 1970s, with its emphatic view that housework was a dirty word and that the domestic sphere was to be fled rather than cherished. In this book Zimmerman questions the unexamined trade-off we have made in a shockingly brief time span, as we've "progressed" from home-raised chickens to frozen TV dinners to McNuggets from the food court at the mall. What is lost when we no longer engage, as individuals and as a community, in the ancient rituals of food, craft, and shelter?