The Ebony Test Kitchen had a lasting influence on African American cooking. “I don’t even know if calling it the Black Julia Child’s kitchen does it justice, but it is *that* important,” a leading scholar of Black culinary history said.
’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 atThe 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.
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,” she said.
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 was the recipes that emerged from the kitchen, however, which left a lasting impact on American cooking. Hall recalled readingEbonywas “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.
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.
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