The Skillet Diaries library was created by Donna Battle Pierce, whose passion for books, travel and recipes has resulted in a collection of recipes gleaned from a deep history of sources while staying true to cultural roots. Skillet Diaries celebrates and honors generations of ancestral traditions.
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Pierce’s years of research has resulted in a growing collection of books that comprise The Skillet Diaries library. Much of this content has been hidden or ignored by the general public for many years. Her aim is to share this history with everyone in the form of stories and recipes originating from her family’s Great Migration era in Mobile, Alabama to her time living in Chicago, New York and California.
“I realized the need to highlight Black culinary contributions, people and cultural events that have been ignored. That’s when I began to know that even no matter what it took I knew I was being directed. I felt passion; I felt strength.”
Biography
Donna Battle Pierce’s parents and sisters, circa 1955
Donna Battle Pierce is a writer and food historian. She grew up in Columbia, Missouri. Her parents were from Mobile, Alabama who moved to Missouri 9 months before she was born. As a first generation Great Migration child, she grew up appreciating the Gulf Coast cuisine passed down from five generations. Her mother prepared family meals such as grits, rice, shrimp creole, and gumbo for her family in their midwestern migration kitchen.
Pierce graduated from Stephens College with a journalism degree and went on to become a professional journalist. A six month tour of Europe inspired her to write about food. After living and working in San Francisco, she moved back to Columbia, Missouri and became a features editor and the food editor of The Columbia Daily Tribune. In 2002 she became assistant food editor and test kitchen director at the Chicago Tribune where she researched African American contributions to American cuisine. Pierce began assembling the Skillet Diaries library project as the result of her passion for cultural books, travel and recipes. In 2015 she completed a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Nieman Foundation.
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Donna Battle Pierce’s writing has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Ebony, BET, PBS, Eating Well, Brides, The Chicago Defender. Upscale Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Oxford American, and Columbia Daily Tribune.
Before my dad became an ancestor, he posed for this picture with Marcus Samuellson in the Chicago Tribune test kitchen. “He’s a fine young man,” Dad said. “Expect big things.”