About Us

Welcome to Cookbook For The Community!

We are excited to learn about your recipe and the story behind it.

Welcome to a place where you can share, learn, and experience the dishes and stories from people all around the world that make us unique. At Cookbook for the Community, we believe that there is a place for everyone at the table and a fascinating story behind their recipe. We created this space to share those stories with you.

Everywhere you look, people are connecting with one another on social media through their kitchens. Here, at Cookbook for the Community, we rely on the stories behind the recipes to bring us together. We designed this site as a place where anyone can share any recipe that has a special meaning to them, whether that is a memory dish from your childhood, one with cultural significance, or an old favorite that brings you comfort in a storm.

Our hope is that through this communal table we will see that there is more that binds us than divides us. We envision a world where cooking and conviviality bring down the barriers that divide us and build up the community.

The Idea

Cookbook for the Community is the vision of Toni Tipton-Martin, an award-winning food and nutrition journalist and author of two acclaimed food books, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, and the James Beard Award-winning, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. She conceived of the idea for this modern-day recipe exchange as an expansion of her research, writing and speaking on the wonderful ways that cultural heritage and cooking uplift the community. We invite you to consider Cookbook for the Community as the ultimate expression of virtual hospitality — an extension of your own kitchen table or dining room, a place to invite guests, to come together, to share a bit about their heritage, or to simply dialogue about the art of growing, preparing, and sharing food.

The Team

With lead technical development by her son Brandon Tipton, an Austin graphic designer and web developer, Toni’s Foundation, The SANDE Youth Project, initially partnered with the University of Texas’ McCombs Business School in 2014 to design a public archive that could be managed by students. SANDE is a 501c3 non-profit organization promoting the connection between cultural heritage, food and community wellbeing. SANDE relies upon the concept of the “Third Place” as a space for transformation, and has hosted pop-up public events that use food as social action for change.