High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [77]
Abby Fisher’s 1881 What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc. was long thought to be the first African American cookbook. Then, in 2000, Michigan antiquarian book dealer Jan Longone acquired a slim volume that changed the trajectory of the study of African American food history. Longone found what seems to be the sole surviving copy of a book by Malinda Russell, a free woman of color. The book, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, was published in 1866 in Paw Paw, Michigan.
Malinda Russell proclaims herself to be a free woman of color on the back cover of her cookbook, no doubt to set herself apart from the recently emancipated. However, the life that she details in her introduction lets readers know that while freedom was essential, in itself it was no guarantor of financial or physical comfort. Her life exemplified many of the hazards of westward migration. Born to a free woman who died while she was young, Russell tried to migrate to Liberia at the age of nineteen but was duped out of her savings and forced to make her way in the world. She turned to cooking to earn a living. She made her way through Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, working at various jobs. She worked as a nurse, a laundress, owner of a boardinghouse, a cook, a baker, and a caterer. She was married and widowed and became the mother of a disabled child. A tireless worker, she managed to accumulate another nest egg, but it too was stolen from her. Russell left the South, “flying a flag of truce out of the Southern borders, being attacked several times by the enemy,” and made her way to Paw Paw, Michigan, where she again tried to recoup her funds. The cookbook that has become known as the first African American cookbook was, at its inception, one western migrant’s innovative way of trying to earn some cash.
Russell, in her introduction, pays homage to the African American tradition of Southern cookery and declares that she learned her trade from “Fanny Steward, a colored cook of Virginia.” She equally states that she cooked “in the plan of the Virginia Housewife.” Indeed, her 265 recipes mirror the brevity and style of Randolph’s book and often are only a sentence in length. Not surprisingly, for one who had run a bakery, they include a preponderance of puddings and cakes. Although Russell spent considerable time in Virginia and claimed to have learned her culinary skills there, few recipes reflect the Southern palate. She offers fried oysters instead of fried chicken and charlotte russe and floating island instead of more traditionally Southern desserts. There is a sweet potato sliced pie and even one dish for okra, which she calls “ocher,” but in general compass, her dishes reflect a cuisine more representative of the Middle American diet.
My grandmother would have said that Russell and Abby Fisher were as different as chalk and cheese. Fisher, the author of the work that had long been thought to be the first African American cookbook, was born into slavery around 1822. Little is known about Fisher other than that she married Alexander C. Fisher, from Mobile, Alabama, and that by 1880 they had migrated to San Francisco, where Mr. Fisher listed his occupation in the census as a pickle and preserve manufacturer. Abby Fisher’s book was published the following year. In her one-paragraph “Preface and Apology” to the work, she indicates that she and her husband were “without the advantages of an education.” In this she was like the millions