“I am the keeper of the stories, the writer, the one who has carried the stories in my apron for so many years,” writes Crystal Wilkinson in her culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks. Wilkinson, a Kentucky native and author of several books of fiction and poetry, shares here the recipes and memories of her Black Appalachian forebears, including her grandmother who raised her. “I am always reaching back,” she writes, recalling her grandmother’s jam cake or imagining the life of a distant ancestor, Aggy, an enslaved woman who married her white enslaver’s son. Cooking a mess of dandelion greens, Wilkinson deepens the connection to her kitchen ghosts and reflects on the lean times her family encountered during the scarcity of winter. She finds delight and abundance in recipes for caramel cake, blackberry cobbler, sweet sorghum cookies, biscuits and cornbread. “I’ve always felt a power larger than myself while cooking,” Wilkinson reflects. We’re lucky that she’s sharing the power with us through this tender and important book.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
