Crystal Wilkinson has garnered accolades for her vivid stories and poems about Black life in the Appalachian foothills. In her latest book, she uses her pen – and pots and pans – to share her family’s story through the foods that her female ancestors cooked.
“Food is the great unifier,” she says. “It’s culture. It’s character… It defines who we are.”
In “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts,” Wilkinson serves up some three dozen recipes handed down through five generations of her family who have lived in Casey County since the early 1800s. In hearty food and stirring memories, we learn of Aggy of Color’s arrival in Kentucky in about 1808 as a girl enslaved to the Wilkinson family. From there we meet Grandma Lillie, Granny Christine, Aunt Lo, and Wilkinson’s own mother. The spirits of these women accompany the author every time she makes a family meal.
“We all have kitchen ghosts,” says Wilkinson. “We all have family; we all have matriarchs that we’re missing.”
Discovering Memories in the Kitchen
The life of a farm wife was not easy, preparing three meals a day often from fruits and vegetables they raised and canned or meat they helped slaughter. Although the women may have been seen as subservient to the men in their lives, Wilkinson says they reigned in their own special place of power, the kitchen.
“At home, the kitchen was like the center of the universe,” she says. “You got your hair done in the kitchen. You recited the Bible verses so you could make sure you were ready for church. People danced in the kitchen. You heard the gossip in the kitchen.”
Wilkinson says she doesn’t remember exactly when she started cooking, but by the age of four she was already at her grandmother’s side, peering into the pots on the kitchen stove. (As a child, Wilkinson lived with her grandparents while her mother battled mental illness.) Granny Christine’s table welcomed the large extended family of seven children, 25 grandchildren, and a handful of great grandchildren for Sunday dinners and holiday meals.
After her grandmother died in 1994, Wilkinson says the family felt adrift, not knowing where to gather. When her cousins said they would just stay home for the holidays, Wilkinson found herself in her own kitchen trying to cook for her three children and her mother.
“I just felt like I couldn’t do it, like how can I do this without granny,” she says. “I was breaking down, I was crying.”
That’s when Wilkinson remembered the handmade dress of her grandmother’s that she had requested upon Christine’s death. Wilkinson pulled the dress from her closet and hung it in her kitchen to remind her that her grandmother’s spirit was still with her.
“It was as if she was saying, ‘Ok, come on now, you can do this. I showed you how to do this. You’ve got this,’” Wilkinson recalls.
That’s when the idea of the kitchen ghost was born. But it would be more than 20 years later before Wilkinson would make that the basis of an entire book.
“I never thought about writing about food in this large way even though the concept of the kitchen ghost had been with me for a long time,” she says. “It was sort of a private pleasure that I had.”
Favorite Recipes for Comfort and Connection
The isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic gave Wilkinson the time and space to write “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts.” While she says the process was healing, it was not easy.
“I cried a lot when I was writing it,” she says. “I was alone a lot of times with my memories.”
The recipes in the book range from sautéed fiddlehead ferns and garlicky white soup beans to Indian Creek chili and pimento cheese “with a kick.” Wilkinson says her favorite recipe to cook and eat is chicken and dumplings, but the one that generates the most nostalgia for her is her grandmother’s blackberry jam cake.
“Because there’s such a story, such a history to blackberries with my family,” she says. “Every summer everybody would go blackberry picking.”
The bushes of Wilkinson’s childhood were located in the family cemetery that dates back to slavery times. To get the fruit meant donning pants and long-sleeve shirts even in the heat of July to protect from chiggers as well as skin-piercing thorns on the blackberry briars.
“It was a hard-won fruit,” she jokes.
Wilkinson’s grandmother would use a few of the fresh blackberries to make a cobbler the night they were picked. But most of the fruit would be canned and saved from the jam cake that was made only at Christmas time.
That recipe is featured in the book along with directions for a dish called blackberry soup, which is served with homemade biscuits. Even when made with commercially produced berries, it’s a dish that evokes memories and comforts for Wilkinson.
“I bought some blackberries at a grocery store, which were from Mexico, and made the blackberry soup and put two biscuits in it and ate it and cried,” she says. “Just that taste, just that hint of it takes you back.”
Those kinds of memories are resonating with readers across America and beyond. Wilkinson says she’s heard from people in Canada and Brazil who are enjoying “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts.” She’s even read to standing-room-only audiences at bookstores while on tour to promote the book. She says the success of this work, which she attributes to the love that went into it, has filled her with gratitude.
“Preparing food is sort of a meditation, and it’s a meditation on the love that I’m extending to whoever will eat my food,” says Wilkinson. “And it’s paying homage to those kitchen ghosts... I can’t step into my kitchen without thinking about Aunt Lo and my grandmother and even those from many, many generations ago.”
