African American Cuisine and Cookbooks
Abby Fisher (b. 1931)
What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking
Bedford: Applewood Books, 1995
Abby Clifton was a formerly enslaved woman who was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina to Abbie Clifton. By the 1860 census, she was recorded as living in Mobile, Alabama, and married to Alexander C. Fisher. By the 1880 census she was living in San Francisco and working as a cook and operating a pickle and preserve manufacturing business with her husband. Fisher gained a reputation among the San Francisco elite for her culinary skills and knowledge, which was bolstered by the awards her pickles and preserves won in local fairs. She was asked by community members to publish a cookbook with her recipes and knowledge, which was published by the Women’s Cooperative Printing Office in 1881. What Mrs. Fischer Knows is the second known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States. After its publication, Abby took over the pickle business, as Alexander worked as a porter. The business was listed as operating in Noe Valley through at least 1890. Abby Fisher also raised eleven children, and is buried in Colma, California.
This facsimile edition was edited by Karen Hess, who wrote the introduction and researched the lives of Abby and Alexander Fisher. It was printed in 1995.
TX715.2.S68 F535 1995
Rufus Estes (1857-1939)
Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus
Chicago: Rufus Estes, 1911
Rufus Estes was a luxury chef for the Pullman Company, in addition to a restaurant chef in Nashville and Chicago. Estes was born in Tennessee, where he was enslaved. In 1867 his family moved to Nashville to join his grandmother, and Estes briefly attended school, before beginning his cooking career in the city. In 1881 he moved to Chicago, but in 1883 joined the Pullman Company, where he managed the private ‘Palace Cars,’ and hosted passengers that included Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, and Polish statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski. Estes worked on the RMS Empress of China on its route from Vancouver to Tokyo in 1894. Good Things to Eat was published in 1911, and consists of more than 500 recipes, which both draw from his Southern roots, and his career in the world of luxury dining and travel. Good Things features recipes for corncakes, as well as dishes served with truffles and suggestions for which dishes to serve with quail. Much of what we know about Estes comes from the chapter “sketch of my life” which opens the book.
TX715.E8 1911
Freda DeKnight (1910-1963)
A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes
New York: Hermitage Press, 1948
Freda DeKnight was a cookbook author and the first food editor for Ebony magazine, whose 1948 cookbook A Date with A Dish is considered the first major cookbook written by a Black author for a Black audience. Freda Alexander was born in Kansas in 1909, and grew up in Boston and later with her extended family on a farm in South Dakota. After studying home economics in college, she moved to New York on a whim, where she met and married pianist and composer Rene DeKnight. Hired by Ebony publisher John H. Johnson shortly after the magazine was founded, DeKnight published the regular column "A Date with a Dish." The column was photo driven, with home economics guidance and a focus on regional recipes. This focus would carry over to Dish‒ DeKnight’s preface to Dish notes the need for non-regional specific cookbooks, which would contain recipes and tips from Black communities across the United States.
TX715.D325 1948
Freda DeKnight (1910-1963)
The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish
Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co, 1973
Date with A Dish was a bestseller in 1948, and was republished by Ebony Magazine as The Ebony Cookbook in the 1960s and 70s.
TX715.D326 1973
National Council of Negro Women
The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro
Washington: Corporate Press, 1958
The National Council of Negro Women was founded in 1935, to advance the lives of African-American women and their families. The National Archives for Black Women’s History was begun by the council in the same year, and in 1958, it supported historian Sue Bailey Thurman’s project to document Black food history. Wishing to write a history of professional women and the African American middle class, Thurman and her team undertook exhaustive archival and on-site research across the country. This work was edited by Thurman alongside related recipes. This was a choice made to skillfully market the book — from the introduction Thurman states that the book “is the result of knowledge accumulated through the years and presented in what we consider a new, unique and ‘palatable’ approach to history.”
TX715.N326 1958
Lucille B. Smith (1892-1985)
Lucille’s Treasure Chest of Fine Foods
Fort Worth: Lucille B. Smith, 1960
Born in Crockett, Texas, Lucille Elizabeth Bishop Smith influenced Texas foodways for generations, in various capacities as caterer, chef, and teacher in schools, colleges, and universities. She was a graduate of Huston-Tillotson University, and married Ulysses Samuel Smith, her college sweetheart, who was known as the “Barbecue King of the Southwest.” The couple established a catering business in Fort Worth, and raised three children. Lucille started her career in education in 1927, and established the commercial food and technology program at Prairie View A&M in 1952. She is credited as the inventor of the first hot biscuit mix, which she developed for a fundraiser, and later created chili biscuits, that were part of the in-flight meal for American Airlines, and served in the Johnson White House. Smith was the first African American woman on the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, and named to the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1969. Lucille’s restaurant in Houston was named in her honor by its owner, her great-grandson Christopher Williams. The first edition of her Treasure Chest appeared in 1941. Smith’s recipes proved successful enough to reprint in 1945, 1947, 1960, 1969, and 1972, although the extent to which they changed or evolved is, as yet, unstudied.
Purchased on the George W. Cook Fund, 2020
TX715.2.A47 S65 1960
Ruth L. Gaskins
A Good Heart and a Light Hand
Alexandria: Fund for Alexandria, 1968
This book was written as a fundraising project for the Fund for Alexandria, Virginia, which supported the city’s Black residents. The recipes included come from Gaskins, who specifies that she is not a professional chef, and her friends in Alexandria — though she notes that the gathered recipes originate from across the South. In the afterword she explains that the desire to write A Good Heart came from the realization that she’d never encountered a Black community cookbook, and wanted to ensure that future generations would have a resource to learn about traditional cooking. A Good Heart was republished a year later by Simon and Schuster.
TX715.G243 1968
Leonard E. Roberts (b. 1916)
The Negro Chef Cookbook
New York: Vantage Press, 1972
Roberts was born in Texas, but lived a global life, having studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, trained in Tokyo, and worked as a chef in Panama. Many of the recipes draw from Creole cuisine and Black food culture, with “vegetables treated in the Southern manner.” This is mixed with a strong French influence (Roberts noted that French cuisine was what shaped him as a chef), from the wine cookery chart that opens the book, to a heavy focus on French sauces and pastries.
TX715.R643 1972
Angela Shelf Medearis (1956- )
Ideas for Entertaining from the African-American Kitchen
New York: Dutton, 1997
TX715.M4825 1997
Toni Tipton-Martin and Joe Randall
A Taste of Heritage: The New African-American Cuisine
New York: Macmillan, 1998
Toni Tipton-Martin is a food historian, activist, and cookbook author. A former journalist for the Los Angeles Times and food editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she is the Editor in Chief of Cook’s Country. Tipton-Martin published The Jemima Code: To Centuries of African American Cookbooks in 2015, which won the James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship, and Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African-American Cooking in 2019, which won the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.
Known as the Dean of Southern Cuisine, Joe Randall was born in Pennsylvania but fell in love with Southern cuisine while stationed in Georgia in 1963. He worked as an executive chef in numerous restaurants, and serves as the chairman of the Edna Lewis Foundation, working to preserve Black Southern food recipes and cuisine. He was honored alongside Lewis, Patrick Clark, Hercules (George Washington’s enslaved cook), and Leah Chase in the Culture Expressions Gallery of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
TX715.R2145 1998