Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl

by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Verta Mae

Book Overview

Vibration Cooking was first published in 1970, not long after the term "soul food" gained common use. While critics were quick to categorize her as a proponent of soul food, Smart-Grosvenor wanted to keep the discussion of her cookbook/memoir focused on its message of food as a source of pride and validation of black womanhood and black "consciousness raising."

In 1959, at the age of nineteen, Smart-Grosvenor sailed to Europe, "where the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820337390
• ISBN13: 9780820337395
• Release Date: April 2011
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

My taste buds are still tingling

FAscinating book, both from a cultural perspective and a culinary one. I've listened to the author when she was on Public Radio, which, along with my love of cooking and quest for all things southern, is what drew me to this book. Sit back, relax and catch the vibrations of what the food is telling you to do.

Voice from the 60s

This is an unusual narrative cookbook, an unapologetic, in-your-face story of a young black woman from the south who travels to Paris on the eve of the 1960s. I enjoyed the book because I grew up in the same era, but on the opposite coast, with very different experiences,although both the author and I grew up very poor. Still, white poor isn't exactly the same as black poor, and so it was a peek into a different existence, of a brighter more energetic person than I. Some of the recipes are rather vague, and it is assumed the reader already knows how to cook. Some are very clear and easy to follow. Reading this book almost 30 years after it was written, the slang of the 1960s seems dated and a little tedious.