Entry · catalog no. 1255

home-cooking

/ /ˈhoʊmˌkʊkɪŋ/ /HOHM-kuuk-ing

n. · Harlem and the Black press · 1930s

✓ Verified

Something very fine — a compliment paid to anything done right, from a solo to a suit to an evening. Nothing to do with a kitchen.

“That second chorus was home-cooking.”

Origin & Attribution

Black American speech of the 1930s, circulating in the Black press before it reached any dictionary. The Baltimore Evening Sun carried it on December 19, 1938, glossed simply as very fine — earlier than Calloway's booklet, which lists it too. Burley has it in 1944, and Richard Wright puts it in a character's mouth in Lawd Today, a novel written in the 1930s and published in 1965. Calloway's own foreword credits Billy Rowe's column in the Pittsburgh Courier as a source for many of his entries, which fits: this one was moving through Black newspapers first.

1938

Glossed as very fine in the Baltimore Evening Sun

1944

Listed by Calloway and by Burley

1965

Appears in Richard Wright's Lawd Today, written in the 1930s

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The Northeast

Harlem and the Black press · 1930s

Spoken by

Black newspaper readers; Harlem jive speakers

$HOMECOThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Dormant

88 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

15/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1938

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@bxgriot

The Bronx, NY

@phillyanne

Philadelphia, PA

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Citations & Sources

■

Evening Sun (Baltimore), Dec. 19, 1938

1938

■

The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive

1944

■

Richard Wright, Lawd Today

1965

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