Q&A: Toni Tipton-Martin

Exploring the intersections of food, history, and culture, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years shining a light on the impact and legacy of Black people in American foodways. A longtime food and nutrition journalist, and the current editor in chief of Cook’s Country magazine and its TV show, Tipton-Martin has earned heaps of accolades for her work, including three James Beard book awards, the Julia Child Foundation Award, the Trailblazer Award (and multiple others) from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and two invites to the Obama White House for her family nutrition outreach work.

Her newest book, Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice (Penguin Random House, November 2023) turns the spotlight on the history of Black mixology, including modern recipes inspired by two centuries of Black cookbooks. We sat down with Tipton-Martin to discuss the inspiration behind the book, what she learned trying her hand at mixology, and the equalizing power of food and drink.

Imbibe: What inspired you to take your research, historically exploring food, into the realm of drinks?

Toni Tipton-Martin: The plan has always been that this content would reveal itself through a series of single-subject books. The approach to start with The Jemima Code was to introduce the public to the idea that there was Black expertise. And then Jubilee followed by showing exactly what that means in terms of recipe development and our understanding of kitchen skill, not as some magical quotient but as something that was practiced with intentionality. So it only made sense then to go deeper into single subjects, and bar culture was a particularly unexplored area. But it’s also an area that is getting more attention lately—all of these interesting mixology techniques, people doing a lot more exploring on their own, and social media creating outlets for people that didn’t formerly have a place to be heard or seen has meant that there is a new interest.

You’ve been doing research into similar or parallel topics for decades; did you learn anything that surprised you when you began digging into beverages?

I learned so much. I invited Tiffanie Barriere [the Drinking Coach] to consult with me because at the beginning I was certain that I needed that tutelage in terms of what it takes to be proficient in bar culture. But what I realized was there was a rich history within the African American cookbook canon to explore the topic and give voice to the past in a way that surprised me. We all knew about Tom Bullock, for example—he’s the poster child for Black mixology. And thanks to so much of the recent exposure of the Black Mixologists Club in D.C., we are learning more of their names. But there were some hidden gems that really stuck out for me. And thanks to [journalist and Imbibe contributing editor] Robert Simonson, I learned about a book called Julian’s Recipes, and that was the trigger moment for me. That book was published just two years after Bullock’s book [in 1919].

How did you decide which recipes ultimately went into the book?

As a food editor, I’m familiar with the process that at America’s Test Kitchen we called the “five recipes test.” It involves the comparison of like recipes to determine what their similarities are in structure, so that you can arrive at a working recipe of your own. That’s just standard recipe adaptation. I want to be talking about that more and more as people of color find new ways to express themselves and not feel confined to a particular canon like soul food or sweet, syrupy drinks. So we interpret the recipes of those around us.

Let’s say I’m in my community and I get my mom’s recipe and my aunt’s recipe and an uncle’s recipe—I have all these people around me who are making this thing that they tweak, and from them I tweak it and make my own version. The problem becomes financial—when you start making money off my idea, then we have a financial problem. But as long as we are just sharing ideas, it’s standard recipe development, so that’s how I arrived at my ultimate working recipes. You can see that in the headnote—I’m intentional about sharing the sources as a way of giving credit where credit is due.

I also love being able to tie in modern interpretations; I’m thinking about T-Pain’s book in particular, or Black Mixcellence, which are the most recent books to address the topic full-on, to be exclusive cocktail books. It was interesting to me to realize that modern interpretations are rooted in a formula, and to be able to expose that people of color have been working with those formulas from the very beginning.

You also took it upon yourself to improve your own skills in modern mixology with the help of your son Brandon, who is a bartender, and Tiffanie Barriere. How did that process of getting hands-on impact your appreciation for the subject?

Hands-on was a really critical part of my education. I could have just read about these recipes and tried to interpret them based on an imagined palate. But you really have to get in there and try it and determine if a quarter ounce is to your liking or if a half ounce is better, for example. And that’s what I like about the exchange between a bartender and their guest. The bartender will ask you things like, do you like a sweet drink or more dry? You have the ability to modify based on your taste, but you do need some basis of understanding from which to experiment.

So having the old master recipes, then having Tiffanie and Brandon as the modern interpreters, helped me develop my own palate. Once I started getting into it, I couldn’t figure out what to order when I’d be out in restaurants and bars! I went through a phase in the beginning where I was just overwhelmed when I would look at bar menus—maybe because I just wanted to try them all. I was really grateful to have the cookbooks as the bumper guards for me because it allowed me to talk about the importance of a legacy, but not to at all pretend that I am the modern expert and have that level of creativity.

You bring the book chronologically up to today’s modern bartenders like Shannon Mustipher; coming from your perspective as a researcher, what do you think is defining or exemplifying Black mixology today?

I think what is exemplifying Black mixology today is the same thing that is exemplifying modern culinary [culture]. People are now free, as the title Jubilee intended, to be as creative as they wish. There are no longer formal boundaries that say people have to operate within this one lane to be taken seriously, to be promoting of the culture. It’s cultural because it’s being created by cultural hands, with a cultural imagination and creativity.

The most exciting thing to me now is to see where they are going to go. I’ve done my work—my work is to say that these people existed, we should honor them, and let’s use their information as a structural basis. Now the next phase, to me, is exactly what has happened in food. We have all these chefs who are reaching back into their cultural heritage and pulling on the threads. And there is more conversation about how we pair wine and spirits with food as opposed to thinking somehow African American cooking isn’t conducive to some of the same drink choices that have been true for other foods. Whatever your tastes are, people are now free to explore them.

What do you think we gain when we learn more about the history behind our food and drink?

As is true of all my work, we learn that we are more alike than we are different. And that there are barriers that have been erected socially to divide us. But food and drink and commensality and the truth of what took place can be great equalizers, if we are willing to embrace that truth and not take it personally. When you read through the intro and it talks about the misrepresentation of people enjoying themselves at a juke joint in terms of “wasting their money,” we have to think about “wasting” as a value. Buying a fancy car is a waste of money. Or buying a designer purse is a waste of money. It all just depends on your perspective. And those descriptions were crafted for a reason, and that reason was disparagement.

There were people of other communities having fun, and doing the jitterbug, and dancing and drinking too. All of my work is a race tolerance project, ultimately. I don’t speak about that very often, but ultimately that is the intent behind what I do. It’s certainly to liberate African Americans and to restore the work to its rightful owners who’ve been erased. But it’s also a way for us to understand how stereotypes can be broken and the need to break them.