When you picture Aunt Jemima, what do you see? For a white person, it might be a soothing fantasy of a loving black servant putting warm, buttery pancakes on your plate. You might even feel a twinge of gratitude,
When you picture Aunt Jemima, what do you see? For a white person, it might be a soothing fantasy of a loving black servant putting warm, buttery pancakes on your plate. You might even feel a twinge of gratitude, as your harried mom might have skipped pancake making all together if it weren’t for Aunt Jemima’s magical mix. But to black people, the do-rag-wearing woman on the package says something else: “You are and always will be destined to be a servant,” explains food journalist and author Toni Tipton-Martin. “Your future offers nothing but thankless menial labor. Better learn how to acquiesce now.”
The fact that this one advertising character telegraphs such different messages to different races is what Tipton-Martin refers to as the “Jemima Code.” In 20th-century culinary history, Aunt Jemima is a mammy, a racist caricature of a simple-minded, sexless female domestic servant that was often projected onto real African American women who worked as stand-ins for white mothers. These stereotypes about mammies—who supposedly had no desires or talents outside of serving white families—were everywhere in the 20th century, not just on the box of Quaker Oats’ wildly popular pancake mix. Sick of these demeaning caricatures, Tipton-Martin researched and wrote The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, published late last year by University of Texas Press, to explore the lives of the real black women, and men, who worked as cooks and chefs after the Civil War. Discovering their artistic and scientific contributions to the culinary world was her way of breaking the Jemima Code.
Tipton-Martin first picked up on the Jemima Code as a food writer at the “Los Angeles Times” in the late 1980s. While sorting the newspaper’s culinary library she noticed “the cookbooks attributed to African Americans in our collection did not reflect the images of the women that I knew in my community,” as she tells me over the phone from Houston. “Instead, I saw a stereotype, the way black women have always been portrayed. So I started collecting African American cookbooks as a way to hear the voices of real people.”
One obstacle she encountered was that throughout American history, black people have had less access to publishing than whites. Of the roughly 100,000 recipe collections that have been produced in the United States since the late 1700s, she’s managed to hunt down and collect around 300 cookbooks written by or attributed to African Americans, many of which are rare, self-published volumes. In addition, her research included deep dives into the archives at the David Walker Lupton African-American Cookbook Collection at the University of Alabama—which documents 450 volumes—as well as the Culinary Archive of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. All told, she reviews 160 cookbooks in The Jemima Code.
Cookbook publishing, Tipton-Martin writes, like scrapbooking, gave American women a means to express themselves and tell the stories of their lives, their community, and their region. For example, a recipe book might also include household tips and shared wisdom, poems, inspirational sayings or quotes, current events or celebrity gossip, bits of memoir including stories about friends and family, as well as photographs or drawings. Cookbooks were also compiled to champion causes, everything from child welfare and education to women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Religious tradition, cultural heritage, and even community divisions are captured in cookbooks, making them valuable historical documents.
While women-penned cookbooks celebrating Southern cuisine proliferated in the mid-1800s, white mistresses got all the credit, and their black cooks remained invisible. Of course, in antebellum South and the Jim Crow caste system that followed, white people who depended on black servants refused to acknowledge their cooks’ creative and intellectual input, particularly when it came to Southern culinary traditions. They insisted that although African American women could be trusted with child-rearing, cooking, and housekeeping, they weren’t savvy enough to survive without a mistress keeping watch over them. And if their incompetence was a given, as these white supremacists asserted, enslaved women and paid house servants must’ve cooked with “voodoo magic” and not actual skills, right?
“An enslaved African who changed a recipe could be severely punished if she didn’t do exactly what the mistress said,” Martin says, so when a slave made a mistake or didn’t have enough eggs, she might pretend something supernatural occurred. “It’s not fair to say that enslaved women’s own ancestry, history, and kitchen experience never seeped into their work. A slave’s hands became her measuring tools, and she cooked with her intelligence. It wa