Shelf Life

A Domestic Cook Book: An African American Woman’s Story through Food

Malinda Russell, the first known African-American female cookbook author, who wrote A Domestic Cook Book (1866), changed the way people understood Black women of the 1800s. During Reconstruction, African-American women were often seen as a domestic servant based on the “mammy” image. This was a stereotype that white people placed on African-American women: a happy domestic servant who are natural cooks. Malinda Russell was born free in Tennessee in 1812 to a newly freed slave. Malinda Russell went completely against those stereotypes of what an African-American women should be by being an entrepreneur, owning her own pastry shop in Tennessee and being a cookbook author. Malinda Russell created A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen to create her own narrative as an African-American woman.

African American Women Creating Their Own Narrative

Since slavery, Black women have been portrayed as the “Mammy” character of being pleasantly plump, happily maternal, and naturally being well gifted in cooking, but not literate, or hypersexual. This forced African American women to choose to fit that stereotype or go against it. Russell challenged these narratives through A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. By sharing all her achievements and even her failures and hardships, Russell showed readers that an African-American women could be more than a prescribed role. During Reconstruction African-American women also used their diet to create their identity. Some African-American women would refuse to eat any food associated with the South, such as fried chicken, preferring —in particular British-European food that was seen as more sophisticated and liked by white people.

African-American Women Entrepreneurs

The decade right after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, was a moment of opportunity for African Americans. Including gaining access to formal education and chances of land ownership. However, these changes were short lived forcing many African Americans to lose their businesses and land due to Jim Crow Laws. Russell was forced to abandon her pastry shop in 1864 because of Jim Crow laws and terror placed by White people. Rather than being defeated, Russell pivoted, moved to Michigan, and wrote a cookbook using her knowledge and authority from her experience.

Southern and Northern Ways Of Food

Much of Southern food was created from adapted dishes from Enslaved people and rooted West Africa cuisine using scraps and leftovers from the masters. A majority of Enslaved people food contained salt pork and hominy, often resulting in a lack of nutrients. This caused African-Americans to become more prone to dietary conditions such as rickets, pellagra, and iron-deficiency amenia. For African Americans in the North, food this was completely different as the animals and influence from England and other European countries brought more mutton and beef dishes, having more nutrients and variety with their meals. Malinda Russell in her cookbook, A Domestic Cook Book, combined both the north and southern foodways from her experience of living in both. She focuses more on northern dishes in A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen perhaps in attempt to break from the narrow confines of Black identity in the south. However, by offering both through recipes, Malinda Russell creates even more of her own narrative through her experience and offers recipes for Northern African-American women as well as White women.

For Further Research:

Russell, Malinda. A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. Malinda Russell, 1866.

Graff, Gilda. “Post Civil War African American History: Brief Periods of Triumph, and Then Despair” In The Journal of Psychohistory. Psychohistory Press, 2016.

Nettles-Barcelón, Kimberly et al. “Black Women’s Food Work as Critical Space” In Food, Culture & Society. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Opie, Frederick Douglass. In Hog and Hominy. EBSO, 2008.

Ritt-Coulter, Edith. “Linked to Africa: An Examination of the Modern Historical Discourse on Enslaved Foodways in the United States”. Southern Nazarene University, 2022.

Williams-Forson, Psyche. In Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. University of North Carolina Press, 2006.