Malinda Russell

Written By Stefanie Goldberg

Written by Stefanie Goldberg

A Domestic Cook Book: Containing A Careful Selection of Useful Recipes for the Kitchen

 
 

b. ~1812 | d. ?

A champion of validating Black women as trained and skilled professionals in the culinary arts, particularly in the realm of baking.

 
 

Malinda Russell is the first known African American cookbook author, self-publishing A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen in 1866. The cookbook was discovered in 2007 by Jan Longone, an expert on old American cookbooks and the curator of American culinary history at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, the only information that is currently known about Malinda Russell is what her own words have detailed in the introduction of her cookbook. It is not uncommon for these self-published old cookbooks to be authored by unknown women of color. These books emerged during a time where “the births and marriages and deaths of Black people were recorded haphazardly, if at all,” (O'Neill).

Here is what Malinda shared with us about her life:

She was born and raised in Tennessee and was a member of one of the first families to be set free by Mr. Noddie of West Virginia. At the age of 19, she set out with a party to travel to Liberia but was robbed by one of the members of the party. She was forced to stay in Lynchburgh, Virginia, where she worked as a cook and a ladies’ nurse on occasion. At around the same time, she married Anderson Vaughn; together they had a son, who she said was disabled: “he has the use of but one hand” (Russell 3). Within four years time, Malinda’s husband died, and she single handedly raised their son while running a wash-house in Virginia and, later, a boarding house and pastry shop on Chuckey Mountain in Tennessee. The pastry shop, which she ran for six years, afforded her considerable savings to support herself and her son. When this money was stolen from her by a guerilla party, she was forced to leave her land and resolved to settle in Paw Paw, Michigan until peace was restored. Malinda published her cookbook in hopes that the money earned from its sale would allow her and her son to return to Tennessee and recover her property (Russell 3-4). 

The recipes in Malinda’s cookbook are precise and complex, offering clear measurements and showing a deep knowledge of technique. The way in which this knowledge is presented is of the utmost importance. Historically, African American women were depicted as “instinctual”, “natural”, “rustic” domestic laborers. This trope functioned to maintain the separation of black from white and, more plainly, to uphold the power and dominance of white women; it looked at the domestic work of African American women as physical and the domestic work of white women as intellectual. “‘[Russell] really does a terrific job of undercutting that,’” said Toni Tipton-Martin in an interview with Eater. “‘[S]he places so much emphasis on the baked goods that come out of her bakery. She identifies the fact that she’s an entrepreneur and has not only a boarding house, but a bakery’” (Burton). Malinda Russell challenges the binary by making visible her intellect, her literacy, and her role in the conversation of shaping American taste. 

Furthermore, the trope of Southern “poverty cuisine” as the universal African American cuisine was contested by Malinda’s cookbook, whose complex and cosmopolitan recipes challenged the stereotype of African American women producing only “rustic” and “instinctual” soul food. Though Malinda Russell may not have been fighting enslavement in the literal sense, she was fighting the traditional cultural representation of African American women as uneducated and unintelligent. Through the publication of her cookbook, the work of a literate and trained culinary expert, Malinda challenged the whiteness of intellect and the professionalization of home labor. As Sarah Walden writes in her book Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940, “by making literacy visible, African American women reunite the physical and intellectual labor of taste through their challenge to its normalizing function” (144).

So much of the work of African American women like Malinda Russell is unknown and undervalued. “Their cookbooks matter so much because there was no other evidence that they could function in the same capacity as professionals” Tipton-Martin said (Burton). One of the most important things about Malinda’s cookbook is that she honors and acknowledges the woman who trained her, Fanny Steward. Malinda leaves a record of her culinary education and, equally importantly, she makes Fanny Steward visible. “[T]hink about all the ones who are standing as silhouettes around her,” said Osayi Endolyn, interviewed by Eater alongside Tipton-Martin. When we think of Malinda Russell, we must pause and honor all the names we don’t know, the Black and African American culinary professionals who challenged their marginalization, laid claim to their intellect, and are forever embedded within our culinary humanity.

Sources

Stefanie Goldberg
Previous

Lucy Craft Laney
Next

Margaret Murray Washington