How two sisters are creating new space for Black food books

African cooking and its influences have spread far and wide. The foods of the diaspora are a crucial part of the U.S. food landscape and make up much of Caribbean and Latin American cuisines. Fueled by famous chefs, codified family recipes, and a rediscovery of traditional African dishes, it is a scene that keeps evolving and changing.

Danielle and Gabrielle Davenport are two sisters who have created BEM Books & More, an online bookstore focused on Black food literature. The store’s name comes from their grandmothers’ initials — Bernice Munford and Marjory Davenport. Their goal is to serve as “a home for scholarship about foodways of the African diaspora.” The Davenports started the business in 2021, and, while their focus is primarily online, they have done numerous pop-up events in Brooklyn and plan to open a brick-and-mortar location in the New York City borough in 2024.

Recently, we spoke with sisters on their decision to create a home for those hungry for Black food knowledge.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us a bit about yourselves before you started the bookstore.

Danielle Davenport: I am an actor and writer and have worked in some restaurants. I’ve done tutoring and translation, but my background is in the performing arts. My sister and I were thinking about starting a business together and started bouncing around different ideas. Both of us deeply love books and deeply love food. We were thinking about the amazing Black-owned bookstores that we love and culinary bookstores and that there needs to be an intersection. There needs to be a Black bookstore and a place to hold and celebrate our stories through that lens.

Gabrielle Davenport: I have been working in the arts as a producer and programmer. When I first graduated, I was like, ‘I’m either gonna go into food or into music,’ because I knew those were the things I was most excited about. I got a job in music first, which was great. It was fun, and I learned a ton. But it’s exciting to come back to something I knew I wanted to engage with through BEM now.

Was there a particular reason you chose food versus your other interests?

Danielle Davenport: The food and book pieces are so in line when it comes to things that we care about and serve as lenses to connect with other things we care about. There was something about the books and food that did sit in the center of us. We both went to Barnard College quite a few years apart. But Gabrielle did Africana studies focusing on music, and I did comparative literature focusing on the African diaspora. We both care about and are steeped in the idea of literature of the diaspora and cultural expressions and how they all communicate.

And this idea of wanting to celebrate and dig deeply into our sort of Black literary cultures, and then focus on this particular lens that allows us to touch issues of climate, issues of labor, issues of deliciousness, just sort of works on all levels. We were batting around different ideas of what the sister-owned business might look like. Bringing those together was like, ‘Oh, that could be a really fun and exciting adventure and something that we haven’t seen before or experienced ourselves.’ And then it was just a moment where it’s like ‘the Black food bookstore.’ That’s everything. It connects all of it.

Gabrielle Davenport: Our mom, Michele Munford Davenport, is a huge foodie from before when people talked about being foodies. She’s a gourmand and instilled that into the two of us. It was a big part of how we spent time together, whether cooking, eating, or going to a restaurant. That’s a huge part of why food operates as it does for the two of us.

Danielle Davenport: Our mom has so much to do with how we found ourselves in this space. It’s also the way she stewards family traditions. It’s always like, ‘That’s not how mom used to do it,’ but also, ‘Let’s go and try something new and experiment.’ That approach to tradition and exploration is something that I also feel we get from her very much, and it’s a big part of how we approach this work.

How much time do you two spend on the bookstore versus your careers? 

Danielle Davenport: It’s been quite the juggling act. We started during the pandemic, and the site launched on Jan. 28, 2021. There have been ebbs and flows within our work lives. Work takes me to different places, and Gabrielle’s work as a programmer and producer keeps her busy. It feels like we do all of the things 110% of the time. The first three years of this journey have been jam-packed. It’s exciting to see BEM grow in a way where it does make demands of us. That is incredibly exciting and incredibly real as we put our energy into all the other things.

How do you select your books?

Gabrielle Davenport: Our directive is if it deals with food in some way, and a Black author writes it, we’re interested. We want to see it, we want to engage, we want to know what it’s talking about. At this point in our development, there’s so much to learn. We hear from lots of authors directly, which is fantastic. And now that the pandemic is moving a little differently, it’s wonderful to meet people and talk to them face to face. It was a particular experience doing this purely digitally for the first year and a half. We’re now obviously building relationships with publishers. And many readers and our customers are telling us about things all the time, which is great. It feels like it’s crowdsourced.

And it’s exciting to be starting to build community and other locales. We look forward to being able to do more of that, not just in the United States but internationally as well. This is very much a project of the diaspora, and it’s important to us not just the books we carry but the way we think of ourselves and place ourselves in a conversation around what Black people are eating, cooking, growing, etc. We want to know the connections between what’s happening here and in Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, or wherever it may be.

Through running the business, has it gotten easier or harder to gauge the boundaries of what books you feel fit in the store?

Danielle Davenport: I’ve served as our buyer and shepherded figuring out what we carry. Everyone on our team suggests things as we come across them. And we’re like, OK, how does food show up?

Looking into the future, where would you like the bookstore to be in five years?

Gabrielle Davenport: We’re talking about that every day. Five years from now, the Brooklyn flagship will be thriving and active and full of people excited about Black food and books every day. And we have started to grow this community outside of New York and Brooklyn. We already get people traveling here from overseas who are like, ‘I want to come see you.’ So, I think about that a lot.

I also think about some other programs we want to build out. We talked about residencies for chefs, authors, whatever it may be. And we look forward to developing our own kitchen products over time. 

Danielle Davenport: Again, there are so many possibilities when you think about Black culture, food, and storytelling. It feels like the opportunities are endless. But certainly, our focus right now is even within the next year. Getting our doors open and having that anchor will be a wonderful place to grow as we get into all kinds of wonderful things.

What do you think is your sister’s best skill in this venture?

Danielle Davenport: My sister is great at pulling things together. When you think about breadth versus depth, Gabrielle excels in the breadth zone, whereas I will zoom in and dig deep. And that’s a wonderful balance that we have. While I zoom in and dig deep, Gabrielle is great at moving us along. That’s both a perspective and a pace thing that Gabrielle excels at.

Gabrielle Davenport: I was going to say something similar. My sister excels at keeping the heart of the vision alive. She’s leading the curation of the books and so forth. She always brings us back to, ‘We’re here to champion Black food writing, right?’ We need to make sure and remember that it is always at the center of this project. And not only curating what the books are but also telling the story and explaining to people why this makes sense. They want to hear more but are like, ‘What’s happening? What is a Black food bookstore? What does that mean?’ And I think Danielle embodies the heart of that thing.

To close, can you give us a few book recommendations? 

Danielle Davenport: To shout out a couple that we’ve been super excited to explore and have had some events for, I will shout out Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs & Juice, Toni Tipton-Martin’s newest, which covers 200 years of the African American cocktail tradition. She started with The Jemima Code, which covers 200 years of Black cookbooks, followed by Jubilee, which is 200 years of recipes from those books.

There’s also The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table by JJ Johnson. It’s a wonderful international survey of how race appears in different cultures. It has incredible recipes, great context about rice cultivation and production, and snippets of voices of different folks from, you know, various cultural perspectives and historical perspectives.

Gabrielle Davenport: Last night, I was with a few friends for a gathering and made the pralines from Jubilee. I frequently refer to it for inspiration and ideas. I was also going to mention The Simple Art of Rice because it has many dishes that are great for big groups, so if you have a lot of people coming over, that’s a good one.

There are a few others in our collection that are oriented around hosting. Sunday Best is one by Adrienne Cheatham. She is a chef based in New York, and she worked with Marcus Samuelsson and at Red Rooster [in Harlem] for many years. She started this pop-up series of events called Sunday Best, where she would cook these big, beautiful meals for folks. She built the book around the food for that kind of gathering.

Another is Southern Cooking, Global Flavors by Kenny Gilbert. It’s a fantastic book to build cooking strategies and skills. There are great ingredient lists before you even get to your kitchen counter. It’s full of delicious takes on Southern cooking inspired by Kenny’s career working around the world. So, this is a good option if you’re looking for a spin on something your family might recognize during the holidays.