Kickstarter

What is a Place at the Table?

It’s a story. This documentary book combines tales from the kitchen. It tells a story through pictures and recipes about what food looks like, tastes like and means in our community.

It’s a collection. As a combination of oral histories, photography, and recipes, this project serves as a functional and active memory of food traditions in Northside, a historically African-American and now ethnically diverse neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

It’s a community cookbook. But this isn’t your grandmother’s church cookbook. This is your grandmother coaching you through the steps of your favorite family recipe. It’s the craft inherent in cutting up a whole chicken, ensuring biscuits are light and fluffy and making a coconut cake that will just melt in your mouth.

It’s change. A Place at the Table shows where abundance meets need, what it means to share, and how people make-do with what they have.  It addresses the past, when Chapel Hill was surrounded by viable farmland, and when streets in this neighborhood were home to cows, turkeys, and chickens. It also addresses the future when our contributors answer, “what’s next?” of our current food system.

The Program: Monica and Lauren both work at a public history center where listening comes first. As they listened, they realized their favorite parts of learning about a new recipe were the stories and memories surrounding them. They, with the help of a dedicated team, began collecting recipes and conducting oral history interviews in August 2011 and continued into 2012. Throughout the process, friends, family and neighbors came together for cooking days – Lauren learned how to cut a chicken, Monica ate hog’s headcheese, and we all ate a lot of cake.  This book has a lot of heart and soul in it. We hope you’ll be a part of it.

Make the Connection: We may be a little biased, but this cookbook will revolutionize the way you approach new recipes. Be it pinto beans, collards, friend chicken, pound cake or coconut cake, you’ll get to read and hear and see the men and women who brought this recipe to your table. But we can’t do this without you.

Your contributions: The money we raise on Kickstarter will go to printing our final product with the best quality we can muster. We’ve got a lot of pictures, and want to make sure our future readers get the best image possible. We also want to properly honor the men and women who gave us a little piece of themselves when they told us their stories.

The Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History: A public history and community development center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Committed to listening before acting, and telling the stories of our neighbors in creative ways for all to hear. 

Thank you kindly for your support!   We look forward to sharing our stories with you.

FYI: Donations to this campaign are tax deductible through our fiscal sponsor, St. Joseph CME church.