Part 4 of 4: A column, a cookbook, and a business of her own
Bessie M. Gant cooked privately and ran a restaurant, which paid the bills and supplied the recipes. The weekly column she wrote in 1943 turned that experience into a public reputation and a check. The reputation sold cookbooks, which she published herself in 1938 and 1940 before a Culver City house issued a greatly expanded third edition in 1947, closing with a section of favorite recipes from famous personalities, among them Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel, Walt Disney, Katharine Hepburn, and Carmen Miranda. Each venture fed the next.2
Food rebels who last tend to work this way. They start with a skill that people will pay for, they keep to a simple plan and work it consistently, and they turn what they know into property they control. Gant filed a column every week for seventeen years. That kind of discipline builds an audience, and an audience is an asset no employer can confiscate. The lesson runs deeper than personal success. A group’s political freedom rests on economic independence, and economic independence rests on revenue streams that belong to the people who created them. Gant could not integrate the kitchens or the newsrooms that shut her out, but she could build a business whose customers were her own readers and whose product was her own expertise. That is what I mean when I say that wisely managing your food system is a strategy of resistance.3
Two questions to close the series: what would you build if the institutions in your field refused to hire you? And who is keeping the records that will let someone tell your story in eighty years?
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), 79 pp.; Bessie M. Gant, Bess’ Cook Book: 400 Original Recipes (Pittsburgh: published by the author, ca. 1940); Swann Galleries lot description, “(Women’s History.) Bessie M. Gant. Bess Gant’s Cook Book” [sale date and lot number to confirm].
3. Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (August 1981): 496–497; Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 19–20.