The James Beard Foundation recently published an interview with Toni Tipton-Martin. She made a name for herself by becoming the first Black food reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the first Black food editor of a major newspaper, in Cleveland at The Plain Dealer. She won a James Beard Award for her book The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, which shows readers more than 150 cookbooks, from historical references to modern classics, which show the history of African American cooking and recipes. In 2025, she received the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her career accomplishments and work with the Toni Tipton-Martin Foundation. Read the full interview and get Toni’s hibiscus gin rickey recipe on the James Beard Foundation website.

You are originally from Los Angeles—can you tell us about where and how you grew up and how that helped establish your culinary sense of place?

I grew up in an upper middle-class neighborhood called Windsor Hills. It was created as part of the Olympic Village in the 30s. It’s a place where affluent African Americans first began to settle when they migrated out of the South and beyond the borders of South Central Los Angeles. There was a diversity of experiences and regions represented in that area. It was a beautiful place to grow up. Windsor Hills sits on top of a hill in Los Angeles, so it has panoramic views of the city and out to the ocean. And those breezes were perfect for my mother and her gardening.

Can you tell us a little bit about your mother’s garden?

My mom became extremely health-conscious to the point that she converted a great part of our backyard—it went beyond an urban garden; I thought of it as a farm. She [grew] a variety of stone fruit—peaches, plums, apricots; avocados; various citrus; she tried pears and apples, but the climate didn’t always cooperate. And then she had all the assorted standard vegetables and berries on fences. It was really quite beautiful the way that she ornamented the whole thing around the swimming pool.

Was there something in particular that you enjoyed eating? 

I have a particular taste for apricots and loquats, things that I just don’t find replaceable in today’s supermarket. One of the most vivid memories I have of her garden was growing strawberries. I would harvest them for her when the bushes were full, and she would trim and slice them and store them in the freezer until she had enough to make strawberry shortcake. 

Your grandmother was a professional cook in L.A. I’d love to hear some of your memories of being in the kitchen with her. 

In those early years, before my parents could actually afford to live [in Windsor Hills], we lived with my grandmother in an area that bordered South Central Los Angeles, as most Black families did. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my grandmother there. She is really the root of this whole work. At first, we would make play-food together. She nurtured my passion for baking in the shade of this sprawling avocado tree that took up literally half of her backyard. We would make mudpies under this tree and then decorate them with flowers. All the while under this plant that was producing avocados, which became another one of my favorite things to eat. 

One of the things I remember most was watching her make hand pies. She’d give me a mound of the dough; we would roll it, pat it, fold it, and fill it. But then I had to be moved over while she slid them into the bubbling oil to fry them.

How have these memories and that time shaped your approach to cooking and culinary identity? 

These memories, for the most part, disappeared as I grew older. Mostly because I began to associate my grandmother with the negative stereotype of the black mammy cook, because of imagery in Hollywood, cartoons—the Tom and Jerry cartoons with Mammy Two Shoes. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was struggling with [the] identity of this woman I loved so much and how she was being portrayed. When I started [The Jemima Code], I was restoring the identities of African Americans on a more global stage. I didn’t really know that I was also restoring and reviving my grandmother’s identity and therefore my own. 

This work has become the most significant of my life experiences because it has given me back the memories associated with my grandmother and food that were robbed from me by historical representations of Black women. I also think I gave other people permission to pursue culinary careers outside of the realm of servitude and soul food because both of those were subjects that mostly confined Black culinary creativity to poverty. And I didn’t grow up that way. 

Coming up as the only Black food writer in the industry, most of what I heard was people who relished their family history and were eager to tell stories; recipes were written around the aroma in their grandmother’s kitchen. I can remember sitting in the L.A. Times newsroom thinking, ‘Well, my grandmother had an aroma in her kitchen. Why is that not as valued in this industry as the stories of other people?’

At that time, I didn’t have much I could do about this observation until Ruth Reichl became [food] editor, and then she liberated me from the narrow work that I had been charged to do for the Times food section and allowed me to tell more vivid cultural stories. And that’s kind of the beginning of the work. 

What was the aroma of your grandmother’s kitchen?

It was always very sweet. Always cinnamon and sugar, chocolate; my next book is on desserts, and it captures this entire history.   

Tell us about your home reference library spanning 200 years of Black cooking. How many cookbooks do you have now, and when and why did you start acquiring them? 

The Jemima Code collection is now somewhere around 500 Black cookbooks. I don’t have as many of the modern books, so that is a reflection of books from 1827 to around the mid-to-late 2010s. 

As a journalist, I knew the importance of first-person reporting; I realized there were going to be fewer and fewer people to tell the stories I wanted to hear about Black cooking. The grandmothers like mine were gone and disappearing, and there just wasn’t anybody writing about Black cooks and food at that time, other than soul food. It occurred to me as a food writer that I should try cookbooks. So, I did not intend to be a collector—I was looking for data.

Part of your goal with your cookbooks is to present a multi-faceted look at Black cooking and to dispel some of the harmful stereotypes associated with Black food. Are there recipes you’d recommend readers cook from or read about to really underscore this aim?

That’s been part of the fun of putting these books together because I tried to remain objective as a journalist and outside observer, but it’s also been my story, so I had this determination to prove people wrong and to validate my own upbringing. I want people to come to [Jubilee] expecting greens and cornbread and macaroni and cheese—and they will find those dishes there—but I also wanted to emphasize the depth and the breadth of the Black culinary experience…