Malinda Russell, a free Black woman from Tennessee, settled in Paw Paw, Michigan, during the Civil War after a series of tragic events displaced her from her original home. In 1866, in an attempt to raise funds to move back and recover her property once the war ended, she published A Domestic Cook Book. As the oldest known cookbook by an African American woman, this slim volume is a landmark in American culinary history. Within its 44 pages are recipes, as well as household tips: Barber’s Shampooing Mixture appears a few pages in from Calf Head Soup, while A Cure for Corns lands on the flipside of Ice Cream. It also reflects the experiences of a free Black woman and the skills she puts to use for her future.
The only known print copy of A Domestic Cook Book resides in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive in the U-M Library’s Special Collections Research Center and is restricted to Reading Room use due to its fragility. HathiTrust Digital Library preserves this original title for digital access, available to cooks and researchers worldwide. A limited facsimile edition, printed by the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, is also available in HathiTrust. This version, created in 2007 “On the Occasion of the Second Biennial Symposium on American Culinary History Regional and Ethnic Traditions,” includes the addition of an index of recipes and ingredients.
A Domestic Cook Book is part of a HathiTrust collection of African American Cookbooks recently created by Digital Scholarship librarians, Janet Swatscheno (HathiTrust) and Kate Topham (University of Michigan.) They derived their collection from the University of Alabama’s Lupton Cookbook Collection, Soul Food and America by Doris Witt, and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin. The University of Michigan Press will also release a new print edition later this month, but you can find this book and so many others right now in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
NOTE: Janet and Kate will present a text analysis workshop to recognize Frederick Douglass Day and explore the print record of African American cookery. The workshop is open to anyone. Learn more and register online.