Who wrote Vibration Cooking, a 1970 memoir and cookbook about African American foodways?

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor wrote Vibration Cooking, a 1970 memoir and cookbook about African American foodways.

Smart-Grosvenor presented cooking as an experience shaped by memory, migration, community, improvisation, and personal taste. Rather than treating recipes as rigid formulas, Vibration Cooking combines food writing, autobiography, cultural observation, and instructions that reflect the way many home cooks actually work.

The book is important because it centers African American culinary knowledge in the voices and experiences of Black cooks. Smart-Grosvenor’s writing connects Southern food with the broader African diaspora and with travel, work, family, and social history.

She is sometimes confused with Edna Lewis, another major African American food writer. Lewis is best known for The Taste of Country Cooking, while Smart-Grosvenor is the author of Vibration Cooking. Their books are related in subject but are distinct works by different writers.