Part 1 of 4: Bessie M. Gant puts her name on the page
Earlier in this series I wrote about a 1930 health column in the Baltimore Afro-American that reached thousands of kitchens without a byline. The source I want to work through now presents the opposite case. On September 18, 1943 the Pittsburgh Courier carried a column with a name, a portrait, and a brand: “Bess’ Secrets: ’Bout Good Things to Eat,” by Bessie M. Gant.1 Gant came to the page as a working cook. Born around 1902, she spent years as a private chef and restaurateur in Chicago and Pittsburgh before the Courier gave her a weekly column in 1939, which she wrote until 1956. She also published her own cookbooks, beginning in 1938 and expanding them in 1940 and again in 1947, by which time she had moved to Los Angeles and built a reputation cooking for people in Hollywood.2
The paper that hired her carried serious weight. Robert L. Vann had built the Courier into a national weekly, shipped by rail to readers far from Pittsburgh. After his death in 1940, his widow Jessie Vann ran the business for more than two decades, and by 1945 the paper grossed roughly two million dollars a year. In February 1942 it launched the Double V campaign, demanding victory over fascism abroad and victory over segregation at home.3
Gant’s column served that campaign as surely as the front page did. Every week she presented cooking as skilled labor worth a byline, at a time when the Pittsburgh Press and papers like it would not have put her name above a recipe. A caste system works by keeping the resources of advancement, including public credit for expertise, in the hands of a dominant group. A signed column is a small breach in that wall, and Gant kept it open for seventeen years.4
Her method was to build each column around a famous kitchen. That September she introduced the comedian Mantan Moreland, who was performing at Army camps between film jobs, and then made a move worth noticing. She credited the recipes not to the star but to his wife, Hazel Henry Moreland of Chicago, describing the dishes as her husband’s favorites. The celebrity name drew readers in; the recipes came from a working home cook. Gant built a market for her expertise that no dominate caste-owned institution had to approve first.
The simplest of the three recipes Gant printed that week shows how much she could do with almost nothing. What would it take today to make a plate of eggs read like news?
[Side Bar]
Bessie M. Gant printed this dish as the second of three recipes supplied by Hazel Henry Moreland, the wife of the comedian Mantan Moreland, for the September 18, 1943, edition of her Pittsburgh Courier column. The scale of it tells the story of the moment: three eggs, a spoonful of milk, a spoonful of saved bacon grease, and herbs from a windowsill or a backyard row. Green onion tops and parsley are the kind of seasoning that cooks across the African diaspora have used to turn small rations into a full plate. Source: Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11.
Mantan Breakfast Eggs
Ingredients
3 eggs
1 teaspoon parsley
1 teaspoon chopped green onion tops
1 tablespoon grease
1 tablespoon milk
Directions
Sauté the onion tops in bacon grease for 5 minutes. Beat the eggs slightly and add the milk. Mix in with the sautéed onions and stir gently. Just before removing from the fire, mix in the parsley. Serve on a plate decorated with oblong pieces of toast.
Notes
1. Bessie M. Gant, “Bess’ Secrets: ’Bout Good Things to Eat—Mantan Moreland Does His Share to Keep Up Morale of Service Men,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11.
2. Bessie M. Gant, Bess Gant’s Cook Book, 3rd ed. (Culver City, CA: Murray & Gee, 1947); Bessie M. Gant, Bess’ Cook Book: 400 Original Recipes (Pittsburgh: published by the author, ca. 1940); biographical details from the Swann Galleries lot description, “(Women’s History.) Bessie M. Gant. Bess Gant’s Cook Book.”
3. Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974)
4. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 19–20, 172, 175.