The story that Arturo Schomburg would often tell went something like this: When he was a child in late 19th-century Puerto Rico, his 5th-grade teacher told him that Black people had no history, no heroes, and no great moments. The remark filled him with fury. He’d been born to a Black mother and German father. The incident kindled a lifelong quest to prove the instructor wrong.
There are conflicting claims as to whether Schomburg fabricated this anecdote. The legend is certainly in keeping with the overarching logic of his biography: Schomburg would move to Harlem in 1891, becoming a towering figure of the Harlem Renaissance, which reached its zenith in the 1920s. “The Negro has been a man without history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture,” he lamented in his influential 1925 essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” He succeeded in changing such perceptions through his writing and preservation of artifacts that could easily have evaded the public gaze, such as artwork and slave narratives.
Bibliophile, historian, scholar—the words that spring to mind when one hears Schomburg’s name have rarely included “gastronome.” But recipes were objects of scholarly obsession for him, too, where he located what he termed “Negro genius.”
Schomburg’s passion for food was no passing fancy. Around 1930, just eight years before his death at 64, he began writing a cookbook, hoping to assemble 400 Afro-Atlantic recipes that showcased the breadth of Black ingenuity in the kitchen. He never finished it, and no one quite knows why. For decades, the proposal languished as it sat in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
In the past year, though, the proposal has suddenly gained new visibility. Schomburg’s unfinished work formed the basis of two very different books published in 2019: Rafia Zafar’s Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, and Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. The final chapter of Zafar’s book is a detailed dissection of Schomburg’s cookbook. In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin writes that Schomburg’s outline gave her “a blueprint of black culinary history,” using his recipe list as a map for her cookbook.
That the proposal is so crucial to two divergent works—Zafar’s book is a narrative nonfiction book, while Tipton-Martin’s is a cookbook—speaks to the enduring relevance of his vision. If America wasn’t quite primed to embrace a project of Schomburg’s ambition in the decades after his death, it certainly is now.