Reading the Lupton African American Cookbook Collection

Bobby Seale, the onetime Black Panther, left the barricades for barbecue. Barbeque’n with Bobby, with its neon orange cover, is a pop culture classic from 1988, full of aphorisms and instructions for the concoction of vinegar mops. Courtesy of the David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.

Few libraries in the American South host compelling foodways collections. Texas Woman’s University in Denton is a defensible exception. So is the Atlanta History Center, where a researcher can plumb, among other documents, foodways research done as pre-production work for the film, Gone With the Wind. And in New Orleans, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum is collaborating with both the local public library and Susan Tucker of Tulane’s Newcomb College.

There are, to be sure, other libraries worth exploring, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University. At the latter, you can read the letters of Julian C. Harris, the son of Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame. In 1931, while working as an editor at the Atlanta Constitution, the younger Harris debated U.S. Senator-elect Huey Long of Louisiana, in print and on film, over the relative merits of dunking or crumbling cornbread into potlikker.

The South’s destination-worthy foodways collection, however, is at the University of Alabama, where the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library houses the David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection. That cache of 450 volumes is chockablock with culturally rich and relevant primary source manuscripts on African American culture. Those manuscripts just happen to be cookbooks.

I recently spent a day at the Hoole, hunched over a table, flanked by dull oil portraits of influential alumni, listening to the whir of electric pencil sharpeners. Upon presenting the second stack of the day, a clerk said, “If you cook something from one of these books, let us know how it turns out.” At the time, I was trying to wrap my head around a recipe for chitlin patties in Arkansas Soul Foods, a mimeographed pamphlet, written in 1969 by Dorothy Brackin, and published by the Pulaski-Perry Library, in Jacksonville, Arkansas. In that same book, I scrolled recipes for baked macaroni and brains, slick dumplings, and farkleberry pie. All were new to me. All were compelling. All proved to be better cultural artifacts than culinary instructionals. A librarian by vocation, the late Lupton was a cookbook collector by avocation and possessed an expansive curiosity about African American culinary culture in particular. Lucky for us, he had an eye for cookbooks that were more than mere recipe collections.

Many of the Lupton books tell a story of African American self-definition, forged, in part, during the Civil Rights Movement. In that vein is the work of Bobby Seale, the onetime Black Panther who left the barricades for barbecue. Barbeque’n with Bobby, with its neon orange cover, is a pop culture classic from 1988, full of aphorisms and instructions for the concoction of vinegar mops. Seale did not, however, retire his ideologies when he quit the barricades. He dedicated the book to, among others, his two sons, Malik Nkrumah (named after Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah) and Romaine Fitzgerald (after a former Black Panther who, at this writing, is still a political prisoner).

A lesser-known work, one that speaks to early African American entrepreneurship, is Adam’s Ribs: The Success Story of Adam Scott, the “Barbecue King.” On the cover, Adam Scott, born in 1890 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, wears a grey flannel suit with a white carnation in the lapel. Between the covers is a biography, told through food and food events, of Scott, an African American minister and pitmaster who leveraged his talents as a cook—and his friendships with the influential Hanes and Reynolds families of Winston-Salem, North Carolina—to hone a career and build a business. Depictions of Scott’s early work in the pits are especially rich and well observed. In an interview with collaborator...