Which 1970 cookbook by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor helped popularize the phrase “vibration cooking”?

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s 1970 cookbook is Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.

The book combines recipes, memoir, travel writing, and observations about African American foodways. Smart-Grosvenor drew on her upbringing in South Carolina’s Gullah Geechee culture and described cooking as an intuitive, sensory practice rather than a rigid set of measurements. That approach is reflected in the book’s memorable title.

Vibration Cooking became influential because it treated food as part of culture, migration, memory, and identity. It is often discussed alongside later works that documented Black culinary traditions, although it is not a conventional restaurant cookbook or a formal history of soul food. Smart-Grosvenor was also a poet, broadcaster, and filmmaker, making the book part of a broader creative career.