Black women make and shift history every single day, not just on the big stages, but at kitchen counters, at family tables, and on tiny phone screens where recipes, memories, and lineages are passed down. In this new BET.com series for Women’s History Month, we celebrate the creators, founders, mothers, and daughters who quietly reshape history through craft and care. 

For the first installment, meet Sonja Norwood — the dessert artist behind Wick’d Confections — whose viral “Lost Black American Recipes” videos have turned food reels into food history lessons.

What started as curiosity quickly became a mission. “We’re losing recipes, and I’m going to find out if that’s for a good reason,” Norwood said in her first video introducing the series — and millions of viewers tuned in to watch her test that question. 

Her posts resurrected dishes many younger Black Americans have never seen in a home kitchen: vinegar pie (a pantry pie born of scarcity), burnt-sugar cake, molasses pull candy, hoecakes, and blackberry dumplings. Each clip mixes a how-to with a short, sharp history lesson that explains why an ingredient mattered and what it says about the lives that made the dish. 

The format is disarmingly effective. Norwood cooks on-camera, narrates the context, and connects recipes to Black survival strategies — explaining how molasses, peanuts, or foraged berries show up in regional foodways because of economics, geography, and ingenuity. “When sugar and money were scarce, the land provided,” she explained in a clip on blackberry dumplings, tracing a direct line from scarcity to creation. That kind of storytelling is why her videos have exploded across Instagram and TikTok and why outlets from Black Enterprise to BuzzFeed and Upworthy have spotlighted the series. 

Beyond the clicks, Norwood’s project matters because it restores the human stories behind recipes. As one write-up noted, the series “humanizes our ancestors, people we’ve never met before,” turning pantry staples into evidence of creativity and care across generations. Many Black food traditions were transmitted orally and were never widely documented in mainstream cookbooks, so Norwood’s videos serve as an archive.

Norwood’s approach also reframes what we call “good” food. Vinegar pie or burnt-sugar cake aren’t novelties; they’re survival desserts — braided into the politics of provisioning, rationing, and resourcefulness. When she makes burnt-sugar cake for her followers, she doesn’t just share a recipe card, she says, “If someone makes you this cake… they love you,” reminding viewers that food is an act of care as much as it is craft. 

What’s next for Wick’d Confections? Norwood says she plans to keep the series rolling and the response suggests a sustained appetite for food history taught by Black voices. When we lose a recipe, we lose a piece of who we are. And people like Sonja Norwood are quietly doing the work of bringing those pieces back — one pan, one pot, one story at a time.