A Memory of… Earliest Known African American Cookbook Author

Malinda Russell was born in Tennessee and lived as a freewoman. She married and had a son, worked as a washerwoman, and learned to cook. After her husband’s death, she kept a boarding house, then a pastry shop. She was attacked and robbed during the Civil War and fled to Michigan. In 1866, she published her Domestic Cook Book: for the Kitchen. This is the earliest known cookbook written and published by an African American woman in the United States.

I have make Cooking my employment for the last twenty years, in the first families of Tennessee (my native place,) Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. I know my Receipts to be good, as they always have given satisfaction. I have been advised to have my Receipts published, as they are valuable, and every family has use for them. Being compelled to leave the South on account of my Union principles, in the time of the Rebellion, and having been robbed of all my hard-earned wages which I have saved; and as I am now advanced in years, with no other means of support than my own labor; I have put out this book with the intention of benefiting the public as well as myself.

I learned my trade of Fanny Steward, a colored cook, of Virginia, and have since learned many new things in the art of Cooking.

I cook after the plan of the “Virginia Housewife.”

– Malinda Russell