Award-winning Food Journalist Toni Tipton-Martin Teaches History Of Black Mixology In New Book

Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice is a chronologically ordered book that dives into the history of Black beverage makers and entrepreneurs.

Culinary journalist and community activist Toni Tipton-Martin shares two centuries of Black history in her new cocktail book.

Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice: Cocktails From Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks is a collection of Black mixology history chronologically ordered around its influence on American cocktail culture. According to the book’s description, Tipton-Martin has assembled a variety of 70 classic, rediscovered, and modern recipes inspired by her expertise, research, and personal letters.

“Throughout history, African American alcohol consumption has been portrayed as derelict,” the book’s excerpt reads. “Advertisements, film and photo images, literature, and scholarship singled out our drunken displays, disparaged our women as ‘loose’ with low morals, and established a temperance movement based on the fear that African Americans would destroy ‘civil society’ with their imbibing.

According to The New York Times, the book explores the history of African American beverage entrepreneurs, including enslaved and free Black women who brewed beer and fermented wine during the antebellum era. It teaches readers how to make some of these historical drinks. As drink lovers move through the chapters, they will become familiar with the Black caterers and bartenders who ran taverns and made punches and cocktails since the late 18th century. “Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice” discusses how some contemporary African Americans reference liquor as a symbol of empowerment and success. It traces the significant yet overlooked contributions of Black beverage-makers throughout American history up to the present day.

“This is really a work of investigative journalism. It’s not just a book of cocktails,” said the James Beard Award-winning author.

Tipton-Martin pulled from an extensive collection of old cookbooks by Black authors, some dating back to 1827. She used this collection to deeply research and provide historical context in “Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs and Juice.”

She relied on 1917 and 1919 cookbooks by early Black bartenders Bullock and Julian Anderson and also uncovered Peyton’s “Peytonia Cook Book,” which had a chapter on drink recipes including juleps, fizzes, eggnog, sours, and manhattans.

“The beverage community has been waiting for a book like this,” master mixologist Tiffanie Barriere said. The food journalist credits her son Brandon Tipton, a formally trained bartender, and Barriere for helping her learn the ropes of the beverage industry early in her career.