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merchants—the all-important middlemen who bought and sold goods for others and functioned as brokers in the growing economy. She oversaw the running of the boardinghouse for the merchants’ employees. In a place with few women, this establishment and others like it were where the men who ran the city met to take meals. By the late 1850s, Pleasant was cooking for some of the most elite families and prominent bachelors of San Francisco. She used her opportunities well, capitalized on the information that was unwittingly revealed around the table, and began to make money with the aid of a young clerk she hired as her own broker, Thomas Bell. (Bell, who was also rumored to be her lover, did so well that he went on to become vice president of the Bank of California.) By 1875, they had amassed a considerable fortune at a time when the gold from California and the silver from the Comstock Lode flooded the city and created new millionaires daily. Pleasant eventually opened her own boardinghouse and became an adept manipulator of real estate and mining stock.

Pleasant was a complex character, and attempting to unravel the threads of her life has defeated more than one biographer. Certainly she was by far the most successful of the many African American women who made their fortunes by opening boarding-houses and restaurants to cater to the needs of the single men who made their way west. Like her male East Coast counterparts, Dorsey and Downing, Pleasant was a staunch Civil Rights activist; she gave money to finance John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and fought for the desegregation of streetcars in San Francisco. However, like Dorsey’s and Downing’s establishments in New York and Philadelphia earlier in the century, Pleasant’s boardinghouses served the fledgling city’s white elite; she employed, but did not cater to, people of color.

Although she owned at least three boardinghouses at different periods, her most famous boardinghouse was located at 920 Washington Street and featured, along with the best wines and elegant food served in its dining room, “lavishly furnished upstairs rooms which were set up as combined private dining rooms and bedrooms.” In this opulent establishment, Pleasant engaged a staff of black workers and busily continued to make her fortune serving particularly potent drinks and using the nuggets of information that her guests dropped at her tables as the basis for her growing portfolio of investments. Pleasant has been reviled as a conniver who kept her boarders enthralled with strong liquor and fast women; some have even called her a madam. But she operated her boardinghouses in a world and at a period when in many places a warm body to share the bed was considered to be included in the cost of a room. Despite allegations and innuendo, Pleasant remains important to the story of African American cooking in the Untied States, for she was the most successful female African American culinary entrepreneur in the West. Using her taste, her business acumen, and her culinary abilities, she amassed a sizable fortune, became a force for equality in the growing city of San Francisco, and earned the sobriquet “Mother of Civil Rights in California.”

Pleasant’s recipes seem to have vanished along with the accurate account of her life. The Mammy Pleasant Cookbook, published in the 1970s, was purported to contain some of her recipes, although modified by the author, Helen Holdredge. According to the publisher, the author “tested the recipes and equated them to smaller amounts, in some cases adding ingredients unknown to cooks of that period.” The 1970s recipes have certainly been adapted, but there may be glimmers of Pleasant’s originals in ones like the Hoppin’ John in the section titled “Missouri Plantation,” notable for its use of black beans instead of the more traditional black-eyed peas; and a stuffed eggplant in the section “New Year’s Supper” that would be at home on any New Orleans table. Certainly the recipes collected in the volume cover the scope of Pleasant’s life and testify to the diversity of the cooking