A Domestic Cook Book
Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen
Bringing new life to the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman
Description
A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell is the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman. Born in Tennessee, and descended from Virginia freemen, Russell decided to move to Liberia at the age of 19. When her money for the trip was stolen, she was stranded in Lynchburg, Virginia, and began working as a cook and companion, traveling with women as a nurse. After living in Lynchburg for only four years, Russell’s husband died and she moved with her son to Tennessee where she kept a boarding house and then went on to run a pastry shop. After a second dramatic robbery in 1864, Russell moved to Paw Paw, Michigan, because she had heard it was the “garden of the west” and published a cookbook “with the intention of benefiting the public” as well as supporting herself.
A Domestic Cook Book contains 260 recipes and household tips that draw from Malinda Russell’s twenty years of experience cooking in Southern kitchens, her boarding house, and her pastry shop, and showcase her skills as a pastry chef. This new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by the late food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualize Russell’s cookbook. Using the only known copy of the original book housed in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center, this new edition preserves an important part of Michigan and American history and makes it widely available to readers for the first time.
Malinda Russell was born and raised in eastern Tennessee. In 1864, Russell moved to Michigan, where she settled in the Paw Paw area and published this volume in 1866.
Reviews
Malinda Russell's 1866 cookbook is a jewel. A gifted cook with a passion for desserts, Russell drew on her sense of the latest trends in baking, along with her familiarity with the cookbooks of her time to create this brilliantly curated collection. Along with friends, we have baked over 100 of her recipes, most of which are desserts. I can honestly say they are terrific. If a recipe is not clear as written, it becomes understandable after combining a little internet research with common baking sense.
- William Rubell, Malinda Russell Recipe Testing Project
Thanks to Longone, we know Malinda Russell and her incredible cookbook, which illustrates the tenacity and contributions of Black women to a vast well of cultural and socio-economic wisdom. Russell's book shows how African Americans have turned lemons into not just lemonade, but many life-sustaining, delectable nourishments.
- Sakina M. Hughes, Santa Clara University
With this new edition of A Domestic Cook Book, introduced by renowned scholar Rafia Zafar, Malinda Russell finds her rightful legacy. Both a treasure of African American culinary history and a testament to her own resilience, Russell's entrancing recipes and life story illuminate the triumphs and tragedies of a Black woman entrepreneur in the nineteenth-century United States.
- Lauren F. Klein, Emory University
Russell's story and skill are a touchstone for understanding early African American and, thereby, American, foodways. It is both a cookbook and a map of freedom struggles traced through hard earned culinary sensibilities.
- Jessica Walker, University of Michigan
News, Reviews, Interviews
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