A Domestic Cook Book : Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen

Abstract

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.