HillmanTok University Black History Month Cookbook Celebration

📝 Study Session: Black Food (BHM 382) at HillmanTok University

Moody Eater enrolled, lit a desk lamp, and hit the books… the cookbooks, that is.

During Black History Month, TikTok became home to a fictional HBCU: HillmanTok University, a joyous, powerful, imaginary space inspired by A Different World and fueled by Black brilliance. Naturally, we had to enrol—and naturally, we excelled in our course on Black Food (BHM 382).

This wasn’t your average study session. It was a love letter to the diaspora. A catalogue of recipes, stories, and resistance. A Black leather-gloved raised fist to our culinary legacy and future.

🎓💡One desk lamp. One Hillman College sweatshirt. One gloved hand in honour of the 1968 Olympic protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
This was more than homework. This was ritual.

What We Studied (and Loved)

We pulled recipes, dog-eared pages, and whispered “I need to make this now” far too many times. Here’s the syllabus, aka: a cookbook canon.

• California Soul by Tanya Holland
• Black Power Kitchen by Ghetto Gastro
• Big Moe’s Big Book of BBQ by Moe Cason
• For the Culture by Klancy Miller
• Natural Flava by Craig & Shaun McAnuff
• Everyone’s Table by Gregory Gourdet
• Homage by Chris Scott
• Eat Plants, B*tch by Pinky Cole
• Cooking from the Spirit by Tabitha Brown
• My Everyday Lagos by Yewande Komolafe
• Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen by Zoe Adjonyoh
• TIKI: Modern Tropical Cocktails by Shannon Mustipher
• ISLAS by Von Diaz

We weren’t just flipping through recipes. We were witnessing geography, grief, joy, and celebration bound together in hardcover form.

🖤 Why This Study Session Mattered

Because Black food is Black history.
Because recipes are archives.
Because cookbooks are protest, preservation, and poetry.
And because we know that “soul food” is more than mac and cheese—it’s Lagos, it’s Kingston, it’s Port of Spain, it’s Oakland, it’s diaspora in motion.

✰✰✰✰✰ star TRY ALL THE COOKBOOKS ✊🏿