The 1776 Table: Who Shaped American Cuisine?
Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 12-1 p.m. ET via Zoom
What did Americans eat at the founding—and who shaped and recorded those choices? This Live Online conversation explores the Revolutionary-era table through multiple lenses. Drawing on cookbooks such as The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy and American Cookery, we’ll consider how recipes were written, preserved, and circulated. Dame Robin Griffith grounds the discussion in archaeobotany, revealing what people actually ate. Dame Laura Kumin brings Alexander Hamilton’s world of entertaining to life, while Dame Ashley Rose Young traces how food moved through markets and peddlers.
The first known African American cookbook wasn’t published until 1866, which reminds us that Black culinary knowledge shaped the American table long before it was credited in print—a gap that Dame Toni Tipton Martin helps illuminate through her work on African American cookbooks.
Robin Lee Griffith is a culinary historian, writer, and recipe developer whose work explores the intersection of historic foodways, archaeology, and cultural storytelling. She is the founder of Dolly & Eliza’s Preserves, Pickles and More, a small-batch preserves company inspired by her family’s 19th-century recipes and serves as Principal of Epicuity Hospitality Consulting. Griffith currently collaborates with archaeobotanists, archaeologists, and historians on projects involving the food traditions of enslaved and marginalized communities. Her research interests include the foodways of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp and the broader evolution of cuisines throughout the Americas.”
FB: Robin Lee Griffith | IG: @robinleegriffith | TT: @mycastironpot (Chef Farmer Mom)
Laura Kumin is a food historian and author of The Hamilton Cookbook, which brings the world of Revolutionary-era dining vividly to life. Through meticulous research, she recreates how Americans ate, entertained, and forged relationships around the table during the nation’s founding. Her work reveals that meals were not just sustenance, but instruments of politics, power, and social connection. For "The 1776 Table,” she offers a window into Alexander Hamilton’s world—where menus, manners, and hospitality shaped influence and identity in early America.
https://laurakumin.com/ | IG & FB: @LauraKumin
Toni Tipton-Martin is a three-time James Beard Book Award winner, and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. She is Editor in Chief of Cook’s Country magazine by America’s Test Kitchen, a cast member of its PBS television show, and founder of a nonprofit organization using cultural heritage and cooking to build community. Toni is the recipient of the prestigious Julia Child Award, an honor given to an individual (or team) who has made a profound and significant difference in the way America cooks, eats and drinks as well as the International Association of Culinary Professional’s Trailblazer Award. Her celebrated books are: Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice: Cocktails From Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. In 2024, Toni shepherded, When Southern Women Cook: History, Lore, and 300 Recipes with Contributions from 70 Women Writers, a first-of-its-kind cookbook for America’s Test Kitchen.
www.tonitiptonmartin.com I FB: @tonitiptonmartin | IG: @tonitiptonmartin
Ashley Rose Young Historian explores the stories that simmer behind American foodways. As the American History Curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress, she brings the nation’s culinary past to life through rare books, public programs, and social media. She previously served as Historian of the Smithsonian Food History Project at the National Museum of American History. Her book, Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans, explores the people, places, and everyday exchanges that helped make the Big Easy one of America’s most distinctive food cities.
X: @ashleyroseyoung | FB: Ashley Rose Young | IG: @ashleyroseyoung
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