Black to the Kitchen
A Genealogical Cookbook
Black to the Kitchen is a genre-defying cookbook that retraces and reclaims Afro-culinary heritage. Blending authentic recipes, ancestral testimonies, and archival research, Dillon Avery Harp explores Black kitchen spaces and recipes as powerful living archives of resilience, and cultural preservation.
Black to the Kitchen combs through multiple centuries of Afro-descendant foodways—from open hearths in the Congo to plantation kitchens in the Americas—to trace how Black communities have transformed cooking into an act of cultural continuity.
About The Author
Dillon Avery Harp
Dillon Avery Harp is a radical Black jazz musician, chef, and photographer from Galveston, Texas. After completing his Masters degree at Cal Poly Humboldt and publishing his first book, Black To The Kitchen: A Genealogical Cookbook, he his now preparing to pursue a Midlands4Cities-funded PhD candidate in Black Studies at the University of Nottingham. His doctoral project, Harmonic Cartographies: Jazz and the (Re)Imagining of Black Identity in the UK, explores the role of jazz as a sonic archive, cultural language, and liberatory tool within Trans-Atlantic Black communities.