More than just recipes

February 10, 2025

In the early 2000s, Jan Longone came into possession of something truly remarkable. It was modest enough in form, a slim volume, only 39 pages bound in a paper cover. But in substance it was unique: then and now, the only known copy of the earliest cookbook by an African-American, published in 1866 in Paw Paw, Michigan. 

In addition to recipes and remedies, the book features an introduction by its author, Malinda Russell. This brief account is an intriguing and moving glimpse into the extraordinary life of this second-generation freewoman born a generation before the end of slavery.

Longone, who died in 2022, acquired the book while in the process of building the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, a vast collection of cookbooks, menus, and ephemera that document American cuisine from the colonial era through the 20th century, and which resides in the U-M Library Special Collections Research Center.

On February 18, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen — Longone's greatest find, by her own reckoning — will be published in a new edition that makes it more accessible than ever. Along with a modern format and availability in print and as a downloadable open access ebook, it also incorporates new scholarly perspectives that speak to its historical context and ongoing resonance.

In her introduction, collection curator Juli McLoone writes, “Before Malinda Russell’s 'A Domestic Cook Book' surfaced, the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman was 'What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,' written by Abby Fisher and first published in 1881. In reading Russell’s cookbook, Jan recognized its importance as a work that predates Mrs. Fisher’s by over a decade, as a collection of recipes that adds nuance to our understanding of what constituted 19th-century African American cuisine, and as the story of an indomitable woman.”

McLoone's introduction also chronicles the history of the culinary archive, and highlights some of the achievements of Longone and her husband and helpmate Dan. 

For McLoone, this new publication — a collaboration between the Special Collections Research Center and the University of Michigan Press — is an opportunity to make this important work available to a much wider audience. While digital facsimiles have long been available via the HathiTrust Digital Library, and remain important to anyone who wants to study the original, the redesign makes for a much better reading experience both in print and electronically.

Frontmatter also includes Longone's own account of the discovery and the subsequent and largely unsuccessful effort to learn more about Russell, first published in a facsimile edition in 2007. 

A foreword by Rafia Zafar, "Malinda Russell: In the Shadow of Slavery's Kitchens," offers important socio-historical analysis, declaring that "[g]enerations of enforced kitchen wisdom assured the cachet of The Cook Book."

"Malinda Russell," she writes, "understood the relationship between Black cook and white consumer."

Zafar, professor emerita of English and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and specialist on the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, also attempts to answer the question "what can one do in the 21st century, when faced with a typical recipe from the 19th, much less one by Malinda Russell?"

Among her answers: seek guidance on absent oven temperatures and techniques from contemporary sources, and that Russell's book reminds us that "cooking, and living, may need less in the way of operating instructions than prior experience — or a cook’s ability to depend on serendipity and go with the flow."

by Lynne Raughley