A Cookbook that is also a picture collection and fascinating history lesson.

May I recommend an absolutely wonderful cookbook called The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes & Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute by Carolyn Quick Tillery?

You can read about my discovery of this cookbook in the July 2004 newsletter on www.elizabethharperneeld.com, so I won’t say more about that here.

What I will do here, though, is share an anecdote or two and Professor George Washington Carver’s peanut and molasses cake recipe.

On page 103 of the cookbook, you can read this:

Before interested housewives [Dr. Carver] demonstrated the eighteen different ways of cooking cowpeas, all of which they could carry out themselves, to a running accompaniment of words. ‘In painting the artist attempts to produce pleasing effects through the proper blending of colors. The cook must blend her food in such a manner as to produce dishes which are attractive. Harmony in food is just as important as harmony in colors.’

And on page 125 appears an homage to collard greens by Aneb Kgositsile:

Collard Green Fields Forever

Have you ever seen a crop of collards?
It is a vision of magnificence.
Walking along an ordinary road in
Tuskegee one day,

I meandered upon a field
where some industrious hand
had sown the virile plant
as far as the eye could see….
Collards and cornbread,
communion meal of

daily resurrection.
I ate the survival leaf as I stood at
the field’s edge,
soaking its cure through pores
and spirit.

And then there is the cake recipe on p. 188.

Dr. Carver’s Peanut Cake with Molasses

2 cups molasses
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup lard
2 cups hot water

4 cups [all-purpose] flour
1 pint [2 cups] ground peanuts
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon [ground] cloves
1/3 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 heaping teaspoon [baking] soda

1 beaten egg
[Confectioners’ sugar]

[Preheat oven to 375 degrees.] Mix the peanuts, spices, and soda with the flour, which should be measured generously. Mix the molasses, sugar, lard, and water; stir in the flour [mixture], and add the beaten egg last. Bake in a shallow dripping pan and sprinkle with [confectioners’] sugar just before putting in the over. [Bake for about 30-45 minutes, or until cake is done.]

[12 servings]

This cookbook makes wonderful reading, whether or not you ever plan to cook a single recipe in it. Check it out and I think you’ll agree.

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Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.