Cookbooks as Critical Archives

Cookbooks, both personal and published, are deeply undervalued historical documents. It is the very elements of cookbooks that contribute to their being under-studied— primarily created by and for women, focused on the domestic— that make them such rich archives. 

There is little popular consideration given to the quotidian, and even less so to the lives of ordinary women. In our collective preoccupation with the spectacular, we lose sight of the daily labor and practices that are the bedrock of the cultures we exist within. 

Yet, it is our hard gazes on those “great men” of history (and the present) that casts a shadow of cover, creating refuge for those whose work is done best in the dark. 

Women’s work, imagined docile, holds and passes down the collective memory of their societies, including and especially those things the powerful hope to erase. These cultural artifacts, shielded within the sphere of the domestic, act as critical lifelines for a culture under threat. 

In our current time of book burnings and suppression, cookbooks serve as archives of cultural heritage that have skirted under the radar of those in power. This is especially true of Black people in the United States, for whom many other archives have been intentionally destroyed.

Cookbooks allow us to regain insight into the cultures and resulting foodways of our ancestors and elders. These archives of social geography allow us a clearer image of the pre-industrialized Black American South, at the same time charting pathways of migration to urban centers, the North, and the West. 

Take the story of Malinda Russell. Born Black and free in Washington County, Tennessee, 1812, Malinda Russell was a widow, mother of a disabled child, member of the Back-to-Africa movement, and self-proclaimed “experienced cook.” She was also the first African American to publish a cookbook, of which only one original copy survived the fire that consumed the Paw Paw, Michigan newspaper office in which it was printed. 

All that we know of Malinda Russell can be found in the forward to her 1866, self-published cookbook, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. 

Mrs. Malinda’s cookbook is strikingly minimal when compared to its modern counterparts. Just a few lines of text accompany  the name of each dish. Yet, the collection is deeply revealing of the writer and of the communities that raised her. The biographical information, the mention of newly created Liberia, the ingredients assumed to be readily available, the inclusion of medicinal remedies– the sparse text is an archive brimming with history.

The scope of cookbooks’ archival knowledge expands our cultural memory even beyond the United States and the land it occupies. Reading a cookbook, or sitting down for Sunday dinner with our families, begs the question, why are there black-eyed peas, sesame, and okra growing across the Southern United States? 

What would you bring with you when facing the apocalypse?

In the midst of being kidnapped, forced to march great distances across the African continent, packed into ships like cargo, and sold across the Atlantic, our ancestors held tight to seeds.

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

The terror of Jim Crow Laws resulted in one of the largest migrations in the history of North America, further fragmenting what familiar and communal structures survived the brutality of chattel slavery. Centuries of violence, followed by decades of mass incarceration and war-on-drugs policies led to complete breaks in family trees— millions disappeared and lost to state violence, taking cultural memory with them. 

And yet, our reverence of these plants continue, these seeds acting as collective heirlooms for African Americans, bestowed upon us through the extreme perseverance and adaptability of our ancestors—human and plant alike. 

African American cookbooks throughout the history of this country, from Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book to Jessica Harris’ High on the Hog, showcase the importance of these ingredients, along with other African crops carried to this land by our ancestors. The reverence of these plants is revealed in the way grandmothers teach to strip and soak greens, in the time spent boiling away a pot of kidney beans, in our childhood memory of watermelon-sticky fingers. 

To plant a seed is an act of hope. One that trusts that there will be hands to tend the future crops. It is in the integration into our daily lives, in no small part thanks to the documentation of cookbooks, personal and published, that we continue to uplift the value that these foods held to our ancestors, as sustenance, and as medicine.

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