The first Thanksgiving after her grandmother passed, Crystal Wilkinson carefully placed a hanger holding one of the grandmother’s dresses in the kitchen to keep her company while she prepared the family feast. She felt her grandmother’s presence, along with generations of her ancestors, lending their wisdom and cheering her on as she prepared recipes that had been handed down to her.
The sense of history encapsulated in food became the core of Wilkinson’s new book, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, released in January. Wilkinson, Kentucky’s poet laureate from 2021-2023, has published two novels, a poetry collection, short stories and essays. Winner of an NAACP Image Award for outstanding poetry and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence, Wilkinson has solidified her place among the region’s great writers.
Praisesong is neither a cookbook nor a family history. Wilkinson terms the collection of 40 family recipes and eight lyrical essays a “culinary memoir.” In retrospect, she realized all of her previous stories have featured food as a central aspect because of the integral relationship between food and the Black rural culture that she writes about. “I can’t write a character in the mountains without involving food in some way. It is natural for me,” she said. “Food is culture. Food is as important as any other marker of a people.”
Through Praisesong, Wilkinson hopes to propel the history and culture of Affrilachians into the national discourse. Her family history in the region began five generations ago with her fourth-great-grandmother Aggy of Color, who moved west from Virginia in the early 1800s as the Commonwealth of Kentucky was still forming.
“Mainstream America is still under the notion that Appalachians are white,” Wilkinson said. “I want to begin to dismantle the invisibility of Black people in the region. My family has lived here for over 200 years. Black Appalachian life, the rural Black experience, is what I’m haunted by as a writer.”
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Although Wilkinson celebrates the warmth and goodness found in her family kitchens, she doesn’t shy away from the way her ancestors’ domestic realities were complicated by race and gender. She recalls her Granny Christine, who was married at 14 and spent much of the rest of her life cooking. Christine saw cooking as her duty, and while she would grow weary, she also saw feeding people as a way to show love.
“Even during slavery, taking something seemingly oppressive and reclaiming it is what we Black women do best,” Wilkinson said. “Kitchens are where we get advice about relationships, hear news, and have our hair braided. They are a source of power.”
Wilkinson includes a chapter entitled “The King of Sorghum” about her grandfather. While her grandmother reigned over the kitchen, her grandfather had an important role in the family’s food production. He butchered chickens, grew and pressed sorghum, and harvested vegetables. “It was a dance between the two of them to put food on the table and keep the family fed,” Wilkinson said.
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While parts of the historical essays are written from memory, learning about five generations of ancestors required significant research. Wilkinson worked with a genealogist, read familial histories written by relative and University of Kentucky sociology professor Doris Wilkinson, and pored over county and state archival records. “I was fortunate that a rich, rich history of my family was already present in oral lore and written in books,” Crystal said.
To reconstruct the life of her first Kentucky ancestor, Aggy of Color, Wilkinson relied on general research, intuition and historical fiction because of the lack of records for enslaved people. In contrast, tales of Aggy’s daughter, Patsy Riffe, abound in all histories of Casey County. Riffe, a well-known businessperson, was born a free Black woman in 1818. She went on to purchase her husband from slavery, and together they acquired a vast amount of property, including the still-named Patsy Riffe Ridge, where the couple built and operated a popular hunting lodge.
During the research process, Wilkinson particularly appreciated being able to physically see and touch historical documents about her family. Reading from large-format, velvet-covered plat books from the 1800s containing records written in faded ink, she discovered deeds that were passed to her ancestors and enslaved people who were willed to relatives.
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The recipes in Praisesong include many down-home favorites that readers might recognize from their own family kitchens: jam cake, chicken and fluffy dumplings, Benedictine spread.
“It is from Kentucky and has Kentucky all over it,” Wilkinson said.