“Family legend has it that in 1868, at the age of fourteen, Charles Henry Darden walked into Wilson, North Carolina. He had no money, no relatives, no friends there, and no one knew where he had come from — he wouldn’t say.”
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For anyone who picked up a copy of a new cookbook titled “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine” in 1978, those words and the accompanying portrait on page one of a distinguished Black man with a penetrating gaze and a perfectly knotted silk tie instantly signaled that this was not simply a collection of family recipes. Indeed, the book was the result of seven years of interviewing dozens of relatives and family friends, sifting through a century’s worth of family photos and testing recipes as varied as scrambled brains and rose petal jelly. The project ended up taking sisters Norma Jean and Carole Darden on a journey through Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, opening up memories and long-held secrets on both sides of their family, a tale worthy of a television miniseries.
In the process, they created a work that became not just a commercial success but a beloved classic that influenced generations of authors who followed.
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Norma Jean, a fashion model and actress, was at a party in New York City in the early 1970s when she mentioned to an editor from Vogue that she and her sister hadn’t learned until they were well into their 20s that they were just one generation removed from slavery. “This was something that the family never discussed,” says Norma Jean, “like immigrant families who are focused on assimilating and putting the past behind them.” As the conversation turned to Norma Jean’s memories of visiting her Southern relatives while growing up, the editor remarked, “Well, you must have a wonderful cookbook to write.”
Around the same time, Carole was visiting their Aunt Maude, then in her 80s. Although she’d been widowed for 25 years from her husband, John, the oldest of Charles “Papa” Darden’s 13 children, Maude still set a place at the table for him at mealtimes. It was on that visit that Carole saw a photograph she’d never seen before, of her grandmother Dianah with her three oldest sons, saying that “they were beautifully dressed and so proudly posed in that picture that I was just stunned.”
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A cookbook was not on Norma Jean’s radar, nor on Carole’s, who was working as a child therapist. Raised in Montclair, N.J., both sisters had graduated from Sarah Lawrence College — Norma Jean in 1961 and Carole in 1966 — and were busy with their separate careers. But when Doubleday called Norma Jean to offer a generous advance after she, along with her Aunt Norma’s stuffed eggplant recipe, had been featured in the New York Times, she thought, “Why not?”
Of course, once they had accepted the money, they had to actually produce a book. Carole, still thinking about that photograph of Mama Darden with her sons, recalls saying, “‘Maybe our cookbook could include photographs, if we can find more.’ That led us to conversations with these older relatives who were in their 70s and 80s, and even 90 years old. So we made the trek, asked about recipes, but, more importantly, we were just filled with their history.”
Norma Jean and Carole are now the same ages as some of those relatives they interviewed in the 1970s (Carole is 79; Norma Jean says she prefers, like Cicely Tyson, not to reveal her age), but at the time they were the babies of the family, who had known only one of their grandparents and whose cousins were already grown up when they were born. The cookbook ended up becoming a voyage of discovery into the lives of people they’d never even met.
The sisters learned the process of making Papa Darden’s famous strawberry wine, which he sold for a nickel a glass in his general store in Wilson and how Aunt Lillian Darden maintained her flawless complexion with a facial mask made of peaches, cream and honey. The Darden family was a study in prosperity and higher education, yielding many doctors, lawyers and teachers, and the recipes reflected their success: lemon roasted leg of lamb, tutti-frutti ice cream, banana doughnuts.
By contrast, their mother’s side of the family — the Sampsons — had experienced such poverty that their Uncle Clyde recalled one summer when the whole family lived in an abandoned chicken coop while working on a farm where they picked strawberries and onions. “Mom’s family was much more humble and had modest dreams,” says Norma Jean. “The Dardens all had helpers and maids, and the Sampsons were more self-sufficient. I didn’t learn how to wash a dish until I went to visit my mother’s family.”
As with the Darden family, the Sampsons’ recipes reflected their lived experience: Brunswick stew made with rabbit and squirrel they’d hunted themselves, spongecake flavored with honey from Granddad William Sampson’s beehives, and, of course, their grandmother Corine’s spoonbread. “Some of the recipes were so old-fashioned,” says Carole, “but we had no intention of writing a gourmet version of our travels in the South. We honored what they gave us.”
The loving respect with which the Darden sisters treated their family’s story resulted in a book that stayed in print for decades and was named by Southern Living magazine as one of the “100 Best Cookbooks of All Time.”
“There’s such a range of food in the book that tells a story about each branch of the family,” says Matt Sartworthy, managing partner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, a specialty bookstore in New York City that stocks some 12,000 cookbooks. “It’s a book that is big and intimate at the same time. You come away from it wondering, ‘What have I overlooked in my own family’s story?’”
Rafia Zafar, author of “Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning,” notes that the Dardens’ book appeared at the tail end of the Black Power movement, when there was a heightened interest in African American culture, not just by African Americans but by Americans in general.
“The Dardens were Northerners, raised by middle-class educated parents, who went to the South to visit relatives and saw how different it was,” Zafar says. “They realized they needed to be in touch with home, which doesn’t always refer to where you’re living now. Home is a metaphor for not just the physical, the geographical diaspora, but also the temporal diaspora that African Americans have. It’s a scrapbook, a cookbook, but also a historical journey back to their roots.”
Collecting that history was revelatory for both sisters, particularly when it came to deciding what to include — and what to omit, such as the story about a child born out of wedlock to an aunt. “One of the things that African Americans did to prove their worth was their morality,” says Carole, “so you didn’t show any cracks in that. Your reputation was your strongest suit.”
A surprising discovery that did make the pages of the book was that their grandmother Corine Sampson was actually their aunt. As the older sister of their mother Mamie Jean, Corine and her husband raised her orphaned little sister as their own daughter. “We were flabbergasted,” says Norma Jean. “Our mother died before we wrote the book, so we never got the story from her. Even our father didn’t know.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was the commercial success of “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine,” which sold hundreds of thousands of copies over two decades, leading to a glossy 25th-anniversary edition published in 2016.
“I didn’t really expect very much from its publication,” admits Carole, “so I was surprised that it was well-received and that people wanted to interview us. I was a young woman like a deer in the headlights, but no probing questions were ever asked. Everyone had this overview of African American people that if you did anything exceptional, then you were ‘different.’”
For Norma Jean, already experienced at being in the spotlight onstage and the catwalk, including the famed 1973 Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, the cookbook became the catalyst for opening a catering company with her sister, followed by two Harlem restaurants frequented by four presidents, including Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, which was honored with a Michelin Bib Gourmand. There was even a one-woman off-Broadway show styled after the cookbook, in which Norma Jean cooked for the audience while sharing her family’s story.
“I can see a line that runs from the Dardens’ book to so many cookbooks that came later,” says Sartworthy. “It’s that search for a greater sense of community that you find, for instance, in Michael Twitty’s ‘The Cooking Gene’ or even Edda Machlin’s ‘The Classic Cuisine of Italian Jews.’”
Today’s food writers who interweave family history and photographs with recipes can thank two sisters — who never even planned on writing a cookbook — for creating the blueprint. Norma Jean chuckles, saying, “I think we started a trend.”