Leona’s Kitchen

PUBLICATION EXPECTED IN 2024

Celebration! Recipes and Life Lessons from Leona’s Kitchen

Charley Burton (editor)

I wanted to share my mother’s world of food through her recipes. But when I started to plan this with my wonderful publisher, Margot Wilson, I realized that this was more than about food. What Leona Burton did was create a language of stories and tales woven around the food she prepared. Through her love of creating beautiful sights and smells, she celebrated her accomplishments and the people in her life. People enjoyed her culinary creations, and every dish had a story behind it. And how she could tell a story!

She would happily tell you how she was sent to culinary school. But then, with her quick smile, she would also tell you that she was the best student!

This cookbook is not new as my mother made a little cookbook years ago and shared many of her wonderful recipes. This cookbook includes those same delicious recipes but also the wonderful stories that go with them, stories which, at a young age, I often felt forced to listen to. As I got older, however, I began to appreciate those stories, heard from her bedside, an important part of her worldview, and I yearned for more.

Leona in the kitchen

I hope that you will enjoy creating these wonderful, month-watering recipes—from her brownies that my cousins would fight over, to the gingerbread cookies my nieces swore were made just for them, to her famous Friendship Cake. These recipes are the stories of love and life. Her celebration language was the language of food.

My mother would have been very happy to see this resurrection of her cookbook, and I am sure she would have had many more stories to share than the ones presented here, stories I never heard before.

So, if I could make one suggestion, it would be: if you have grannies, aunties, or mothers in your life, listen to their stories. It is a language that we, as African Americans, need to continue to share from generation to generation.