Cookbook Club

Cookbook Review: Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

By: Emily Havener
Cookbook Cover: Praisesong For The Kitchen Ghosts

“I’ve always felt a power larger than myself while cooking.” There are so many lines from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson (Clarkson Potter, 2024) that I’ve underlined, but this one encompasses the essence of her collection of stories and recipes of Black Appalachia. Wilkinson is a poet and storyteller, a writer and a cook, and Praisesong is both a lovely and powerful literary work that identifies writing a cookbook for what it truly ought to be—one of the highest forms of art. 

Wilkinson has researched and then imagined to life multiple generations of the women in her family, Black women who have lived in the Kentucky mountains since enslavement. She writes, “I refuse to believe that my grandmothers were just ordinary women who lived, then died, forever lost to me. … I’m closer to them when I cook. I become them when I cook.”

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Date Published: 05.31.24
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About The Author

Emily Havener

Emily Havener enjoys writing about food almost as much as she enjoys eating it. She has been food blogging and developing recipes since 2008, and her particular areas of expertise are finding creative ways to use leftovers and never making a recipe the same way twice. She’s always up for raw fish of any kind and a good gin cocktail or a glass of orange wine.

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