Food for Thought: Sweet Home Café Cookbook

I was excited, but also disappointed, when I visited Sweet Home Café inside the fabulous Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C. The buttermilk fried chicken was moist inside, crunchy outside as it’s supposed to be. Collards, potato salad, cole slaw and cornbread were executed with dignity. But several of the day’s specials had sold out at the height of the lunch hour. And some of the signature dishes which opened the restaurant, like the oyster loaf, had been discontinued for lack of volume sales.

I feel the same way about the Sweet Home Café Cookbook. First appearances are jarring: it has a bright, simplified layout like one of those cookbooks appealing to beginner cooks you might find in Costco. There are some toothsome historical discussions, with graphics, at the beginning of each section. But the recipes themselves are presented without adornment, lacking the history and chef’s perspective that makes you eager to try a new dish.

Take cornbread, for example. There are 4 recipes for cornbread, 5 if you count hush puppies. But there’s no narrative to help you decide what makes them different, and why you might want to try one vs another. The recipe for Cracklin’ Cornbread advises the cook to substitute bacon if authentic cracklins are unavailable; chicharrones would have been a far better choice. And a recipe containing white flour and sugar is presented with a straight face, instead of the proper admonition that this is a bowdlerized, Yankee-fied version. One suspects such an explanation was there to begin with, but was eliminated so as not to offend anyone.

I generally need to find at least two or three can’t-miss recipes to recommend a cookbook, and on that basis Sweet Home Café Cookbook falls short. But I suggest you browse it and see for yourself. Get it out of the library (I did) or use the “look inside” feature on Amazon to explore a few of the recipes. Check it out.