I was just five years old when the vibe in my grandmother Nannie’s kitchen aroused my culinary curiosity. It took 30 years and a dozen other hidden figures of the food world for me to appreciate the kitchen as a site for social change.

Quaker Oats announced this week that it will be retiring Aunt Jemima, the caricature of black cooks that has been used to market pancake mix and syrup for 131 years. Based in blackface minstrel songs, the character, with her 19th-century garb and head scarf, promoted a commodified version of antebellum imagery that valorized the enslavement of human beings. The trope of Aunt Jemima is a monument to the good old days and keeping black women in their place, and I believe in tearing down the monument. But I also want to remember the people whose characteristics she was built on: real women whose values and skills have been misrepresented by her image.

Before we moved to Windsor Hills, my parents and I lived with Nannie in a small, two-bedroom house in South Los Angeles, where Spanish-tiled roofs, manicured lawns and cheerful flower beds blooming with brightly-hued roses and bird-of-paradise bushes accented the neighborhood. The air there was sweet, scented with the perennial perfume of purple Jacaranda blooms.

It might sound cliché, but Nannie’s kitchen was the heart of her home. You walked through it on your way to the dining room, passed by it on your way to the bathroom and looked into it from the bar counter in the adjoining room we called the dinette.

My food education started in that kitchen. At first, Nannie and I made mud pies together. Then she began to nurture my passion for baking with real ingredients. I can still see her standing against a backdrop of speckled white laminate countertops, teaching me to make the crust for her fried pies. She would hold one small mound of dough in her left hand while patting it into a flat, thin round with her right. I was not allowed to get close as she stood facing the stove, gently sliding tiny hand pies into the simmering oil, but the scent of nutmeg and apples or peaches reached my perch at the end of the countertop.

My grandmother didn’t just teach me how to make pie crust light with a snap of the fingers. She passed along subtle messages about kitchen discipline, order and cleanliness, too. We chatted and I watched attentively, absorbing her techniques as well as her life lessons while splashing dishwater and popping bubble clouds in the warm sunshine that beamed through the three double-hung windows just above the sink.

Nannie was a handsome woman. She was heavyset, and her glowing, cocoa-brown complexion accentuated both her African and her Native American features. She wasn’t what black folks call “dark-complected,” but she couldn’t pass the “lighter than a paper bag” test either. Most of the time, she wore her hair tied in a scarf or tucked into her favorite hat. This, I would learn years later, was one of the strands of our family’s Louisiana heritage that Nannie inherited. In the late 18th century, lawmakers in the region, which was then a Spanish colony, conspired to downplay African beauty by enacting “tignon laws,” which prohibited black women from displaying their hair in public. In defiance of the law, free Creole women of color repurposed the head scarf of oppression. They reclaimed the Yoruban gele, wrapped their heads in ornate turbans and flaunted their freedom and their West African ancestry.

But as a child, I did not know about this history. To me, Nannie’s scarf was ugly. I looked at all the perfect coiffures of Hollywood, a parade of white women onscreen with their waves arranged just so. And then I looked at my grandmother and saw her hair covered up in what seemed like shame. I did not understand the impact of culinary brainwashing on my young mind, first by Mammy Two Shoes — the large, African-American cartoon cook who chased Tom and Jerry across my television screen wearing a blue maid’s dress, a white apron and house slippers — and then by Annie, the dark-skinned housemaid in the film “Imitation of Life,” who shared my grandmother’s name, performed similarly menial day work and cooked privileged folks’ food. And of course, there was always Jemima, staring at me from the box of pancake mix.

I was too young to recognize that Nannie’s head scarf could be practical, even celebratory. Covering the head ensures that loose hairs don’t fall into the mixing bowl, while at the same time protecting your hairdo from the smells and steam that escape from the pot. And the scarf’s two-sided history, passed down by our proud Creole ancestors, elevated Nannie’s “durag” into a toque — the tall white hat that increases a chef’s stature.

For years, my first kitchen story was crowded out. I walled my grandmother in behind an emotional fortress that left me feeling inadequate and insecure. And I struggled against these images of food and cooking that had been stereotyped and weaponized to distract and discourage me from my fulfilling purpose. Aunt Jemima, especially in her original design, was created to convey two messages. She told consumers that black women created high-quality food, and that the mixes and syrups she hawked could therefore be trusted to be high-quality products. But she also told women like me that, even in freedom, we were still confined to work in the kitchen. She kept us in our place.

After my father was killed in Los Angeles in 1995, I began studying black food history. In time, values like proficiency, self-discipline, resourcefulness, creativity, leadership, resistance, self-empowerment, integrity, resilience, compassion, confidence and the pursuit of excellence revealed themselves in black cooks’ stories. Like garlands of grace, these new truths — Jemima clues, I called them — ended the tyranny of the stereotype. The spell broke. Black cooks became role models who taught ways the kitchen can redeem and restore.

Their lessons became my first book, “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks.” In sharing their work, I was able to take back the caricature and break my personal Jemima code. I discovered kindred spirits and tuned out negative and defeating thoughts that had obscured these women’s true worth. By respecting and honoring their legacy, I transformed from self-conscious to confident and hopeful.

I thank God for the cooks in “The Jemima Code,” and those in my cookbook, “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking.” Especially now, in the midst of civil unrest, unrelenting oppression, police brutality, economic inequity, a pandemic and so much more, their recipes feel like prophecy — whispering life lessons and liberating truths I had been listening for my entire life.

These black women, many of whom I have never met, have nurtured me through traumatic experiences the way black women have helped one another overcome assaults of every kind for generations — from the sexual abuse and other horrors of enslavement to the lynchings and police brutality that still kill our family members today. You could say that when I lost my earthly father, my Heavenly Father sent guardian angels to lead the way out of hopelessness to healing. My forthcoming memoir, “Come On In My Kitchens: The Hope of Jemima,” is a love letter to them.

In these tumultuous times, I believe a little curiosity can light a pathway to freedom for us all. When we reflect on our true heritage, celebrate individual black lives beyond the plantation story and empathetically put aside the long-held beliefs and prejudices that were designed to divide us, we can reclaim our values and enact radical hospitality that offers more than just entertainment. Retiring Jemima is a good first step, but it is just that: a step. We need scholarships for black culinary students. We need support for black-owned restaurants and food businesses. We need more black journalists who can do the essential work of unearthing the stories behind these harmful images and translating the scholarship around them into the mainstream, so that the greater public understands the wisdom and knowledge that these tropes have erased. Freedom is a seat at the table for real African-Americans, not stereotypes — a fellowship that spurs increased economic opportunities and better community health.

In other words: It is time to embrace the bandanna.

Toni Tipton-Martin is a two-time James Beard Foundation award-winning author and journalist. She was the first African-American food editor at a major metropolitan daily newspaper in the United States and is a co-founder and former president of both the Southern Foodways Alliance and Foodways Texas. This essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, “Come On In My Kitchens: The Hope of Jemima.”