One woman’s quest to rescue lost Black American recipes

Last Thanksgiving, content creator Sonja Norwood saw a video for vinegar pie. She tells Today that upon seeing the video, “I was like, ‘What is this?’ And I heard it was a Black recipe, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna make this for Black History Month.’” What started as a single post quickly grew. Norwood, who goes by Wick’d Confections on Instagram, noted that “the response that I got was crazy. I wasn’t expecting to do so many. I’m doing one every day now.”

Norwood is now on a mission to find more recipes significant to the Black community that were being lost to time. She tries each recipe on camera – always impeccably dressed – and provides her honest feedback on the dish. For the initial video, her feedback included that “It doesn’t taste the way you think a vinegar pie would taste. The acidity cuts through the sweetness and mimics lemon pie.”

In addition to vinegar pie, Norwood made burnt sugar cake, hoecakes, sugar-boiled custard, banana croquettes and molasses pull candy. Norwood doesn’t just make old recipes, she provides context for how the recipe came to be. For example, in the molasses pull candy video, she explains that molasses frequently appears in Black American food because it was often given to slaves as a byproduct of the sugar-refining process. They would use it to make liquor, eventually distilling it to create rum and eventually Black cooks like Lucretia Brown used molasses in baking. Brown is credited with inventing Joe Frogger cookies.

Norwood says this project has become very important to her, explaining that learning about and sharing these old recipes “humanizes our ancestors, people we’ve never met before. Maybe we have some cognitive dissonance with that situation, but this gives them some humanity.”