One morning in January, 2020, a group of curators and officials from the Museum of Food and Drink headed out to the industrial edge of Queens to assess the status of their most high-profile acquisition to date: the Ebony Test Kitchen. The kitchen, originally situated on the tenth floor of the Johnson Publishing Company Building, in downtown Chicago, tested recipes for Ebony magazine’s famed “Date with a Dish” cooking column, which became a touchstone of African American cuisine. “This kitchen, it’s like—I don’t even know if calling it the Black Julia Child’s kitchen does it justice, but it is that important,” Jessica B. Harris, one of the leading scholars of Black culinary history, told me. In 2017, news emerged that the building which housed the kitchen was about to be converted into apartments. To save it, volunteer preservationists rushed in and dismantled the kitchen in a single weekend. They selected mofad as the new stewards. In February, it will finally be put on display, in an exhibition called “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table,” curated by Harris, at the Africa Center, in Harlem. “Let’s hope I keep it together,” Harris told me, as we prepared to head to the Queens warehouse. “Those walls will start shimmering and talking. I probably contributed to some of the grease on them.”
The Ebony Test Kitchen was part of a decades-long project by John H. Johnson, the first African American to make Forbes’s list of the richest Americans. Johnson built a publishing empire dedicated to the idea of accurately reflecting Black culture and achievements; he founded Ebony in 1945, and modelled it after the large, photo-driven format of Life magazine. “Before I started Ebony you’d never know from reading other publications that blacks got married, had beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, or carried on any normal living activities,” Johnson reportedly said. Alongside life-style stories, Johnson’s multiple magazines published unflinching journalism. In 1955, Jet published graphic photographs of Emmett Till’s mutilated body in its casket, at his mother’s request, spurring national outrage and helping to jump-start the civil-rights movement. For a time, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., served as an advice columnist at Ebony.
The Johnson Publishing Company Building, the headquarters of Johnson’s empire, was designed by John Warren Moutoussamy, an African American student of the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Inside, “it was like ‘Mad Men,’ O.K.?” Harris said. “It was that building done by an African American millionaire who was conscious of what that building meant to everybody else.” The design wove in celebrations of Black achievement, including a collection of work by Black artists, and a library of volumes written primarily by or about Black people. Cutting-edge technology, like a conference room “picturephone,” was included alongside “employee-pampering conveniences in which black creativity could blossom and the production of black magazines would be a joy,” an Ebony feature read. The headquarters included men’s and women’s lounges with a full range of hair-care products, “so that employees can keep their Afros styled.”
The interior featured rollicking colors; walls covered in suède, leather, and African wood; and rampaging geometric patterns. Carla Hall, a chef and the former co-host of “The Chew,” who is consulting on the exhibition, told me that, when she saw the kitchen for the first time, it reminded her of her family’s. “I was, like, Of course,” she said. “I remember our kitchen, with those handles and the brown panelling, you know? You think about the avocado green and that mustard and that orange—that was my mother’s house. Right? That mid-century funkadelic.” In 1985, Johnson hired Charlotte Lyons as Ebony’s food editor. When she arrived for her interview, he asked a crucial question: Could she bake a pound cake? “I could bake one with my eyes closed,” Lyons, who had previously worked at Betty Crocker, told me. Johnson sent someone out to buy supplies, and then they took Lyons up to the kitchen, with its psychedelic immersion. “At first I’m just looking around. I’m, like, ‘Oof, you wouldn’t want to have a drink up in this kitchen,’ ” she said. “It was the swirls.” The pound cake was delicious. She was hired on the spot.
Lyons stayed on as the food editor for twenty-five years, overseeing the column “Date with a Dish.” I grew to really, really love the kitchen,” she said. “It had a lot of little secret stuff.” There was a toaster that popped out of the wall, built-in can openers, and a Ronson Foodmatic that could emerge from the countertop and had attachments for stirring, folding, creaming, whipping, blending, beating, puréeing, grating, chopping, and liquifying. It could also serve as a juicer, knife sharpener, meat grinder, shredder, coffee mill, and ice crusher. The kitchen was often frequented by high-profile guests, including Presidents and Presidential candidates. At one point, Lyons fended off Mike Tyson, who was trying to eat a chocolate cake styled for an upcoming shoot. “One of his handlers said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ ” she told me. “I was thinking, I’m not going to spend another two hours on this.” She baked cookies for Luther Vandross (“he loved the cookies”) and met Janet Jackson (“a lot of times they’d say Michael would come in the building, but he would always have a disguise and you would never know until he left.”)
It was the recipes that emerged from the kitchen, however, which left a lasting impact on American cooking. Hall recalled reading Ebony growing up and watching her grandmother cook its recipes. “I mean, if you found a recipe in Ebony magazine, that meant that it was for you,” she said. She noted that Ebony was “almost like the Bible of our culture.” The cuisine was rooted in the African American tradition, but Lyons expanded and updated it to serve a modern audience. “I wanted to keep the African American recipes, the soul food and all that, but I wanted them to be healthier,” Lyons said. She also incorporated recipes she came across in the course of her world travels, from countries such as Italy and South Africa. When Johnson challenged her about including mushrooms in a recipe, asking, “Do you really think Black people eat mushrooms?,” she held firm. “It was a popular recipe,” Lyons said. Johnson died in 2005, and the company’s fortunes faltered. In 2010, Johnson Publishing Company sold its building, and the kitchen went dark. But its legacy shaped generations of chefs. When Hall started a catering business, in 1990, she grabbed copies of Ebony from a friend’s old stash and cooked from its pages. “In my cookbook, I say the difference between Southern food and soul food is like the difference between a hymn and a Negro spiritual, and as soon as I say that to people they’re like, ‘O.K., got it,’ ” she said. “That’s what the kitchen reminds me of—unapologetic, bam, spice, in your face, this is us, loud and proud and unapologetically Black.”
The kitchen arrived in New York in pieces, and, when the team from mofad visited it in Queens two years ago, fabricators were trying to put it back together. As she entered the warehouse to view the work in progress, Harris, the chief curator, looked around slowly. “Wow, wow, wow,” she murmured softly. She took in the swirling orange and brown of the cabinet façades and wallpaper, the interlaced green, purple, and orange carpet pattern. “It is wacko.” Workers were diligently comparing paint swatches to find just the right pulsing shade of yellow to match the fabric-wrapped bookcases. Workers knifed open plastic rolls to reveal the re-created carpet weave of green, brown, white and purple. Under one countertop hung a jar still filled with the drippings from the kitchen’s last meals, the grease long settled into orange, white, and brown stripes, like the cloud bands of Jupiter.
The exhibition had originally been scheduled to open just before the pandemic shutdown began in New York. It has sat in the darkened exhibition hall since then. “This is not its first time, if you want to personify it, living solo,” Harris said, of the kitchen, recalling that it had remained in the Ebony offices long after they’d closed, where it was “perhaps a lot less coddled.” Harris said that seeing the kitchen always brought her back to when she used to visit Lyons there. “It’s always, I guess, the equivalent of a time machine for me,” she said. Visitors will enter the exhibit through the sitting room, before stepping into the main kitchen. Three one-minute videos featuring interviews will be strategically placed throughout, while a playlist curated by Kelis, focussing on seventies-era soul music, will form the backdrop. Visitors will edge around the curve of the center stovetop island and resist the urge to put their elbows everywhere—a test the museum officials sheepishly admitted they failed during their own inspection. “We just walked in there and we were leaning all over it,” Peter Kim, the museum’s former director, noted, in a meeting after the walk-through.
Lyons told me that, when she worked at Betty Crocker, the facility was industrial, equipped with large, standard appliances to facilitate rapid recipe testing. The Johnson kitchen was a public space, an office, and a celebrity hot spot, but it also had an intimate feel. “At Johnson Publishing, it was like one person’s kitchen,” Lyons said. The curators wanted to re-create that sense of intimate connection. After heated internal debate, they decided to extend the width of the floor by fourteen inches, so that visitors would be able to walk through the kitchen, not just see it from the outside. “It is such a space of its time that just the sheer fact of being able to go through it, to be in it, is going to make some folks’ head spin around,” Harris said. “And I always like spinning heads.”
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