A Date with a Dish: A Cookbook of American Negro Recipes
New York: Hermitage Press, Inc., 1948.
First edition, first printing. Signed by Freda DeKnight on the front free endpaper and inscribed to a previous owner. xiv, 426 pp., text printed in brown. Bound in publisher's brown cloth stamped in maroon; lacking the dust jacket. Near Fine with light rubbing to extremities, small bump to lower corner of rear board, minimal staining to textblock edges. Tipton-Martin p. 62.
A very nice signed copy of a groundbreaking cookbook. Freda DeKnight spent 20 years gathering material from Black American cooks from all walks of life, from chefs to celebrities to housewives. Her cookbook was intended for a Black audience and covered a range of food genres, in contrast to the "soul food" cookbooks aimed at White audiences. "There are no set rules for dishes created by most Negroes," she writes in the preface. "They just seem to have a 'way' of taking a plain, ordinary, everyday dish and improvising it into a creation that is a gourmet's delight."
DeKnight was the first food editor for Ebony magazine, and her bestselling treasury of recipes and tips was republished as The Ebony Cookbook in the 1960s and 70s. The later editions became household staples, but only the 1948 edition contains the 67-page section "Collectors' Corner," which features personal stories from several cooks.
Price: $1,500