One poster, a librarian, said she’d even included it in a book discussion at her library. Multiple women in this community of home chefs swore that Jubilee was the book to get, noting that their copies were full of sticky notes and dog-eared pages. It was earlier this year that someone in the group posted a photo of Toni Tipton-Martin’s 2019 cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, and the cover photo of saucy, juicy shrimp drew me in. On any given day, I can scroll through the feed and find drool-inducing pictures of sizzling roasts, glazed pound cakes, and potato salad with that perfectly yellowed hue that confirms the person who made it has earned the right to.

One of my go-to sources is Black Girls Cook and Mealplan, a private Facebook group for Black women who like to share their recipes. So I’m always on the hunt for recipes that taste like my upbringing. Dishes like baked macaroni and cheese, sweet potato pie, and fried okra are rooted in rich history, connecting Black people in a way that transcends generations. And ever since she planted the seed of cooking curiosity, my connection to traditional Black American foods has been an important part of my culture that I’ve wanted to preserve. My grandmother passed away when I was in middle school, before I was able to learn all of her cooking knowledge and recipes. Our relationship around creating meals together is a fond memory of my childhood spent enjoying plates of smothered turkey wings and expertly seasoned collard greens. She’d tell me stories about the foods she loved as a young girl living in a sharecropping home in the Deep South, and I’d grimace at the thought of eating pickled pigs’ feet and scrapple. She’d chop, I’d mix she’d blend, and I’d taste-test. I grew up in the kitchen, next to my grandmother.

Here, Latifah Miles on the cookbook that connects her to her Black cultural heritage. To close out the year, we’ve asked our staffers to write about the best thing they bought in the past 12 months. If you’ve read any of our Strategist editor hauls, you’ll know that our writers and editors buy a lot of stuff, and even though we think carefully about each item that goes into our carts, there are still standouts.

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist Photos: Writers

Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin