Abby Fisher

Abby Fisher was born enslaved about 1831 at Orangeburg, South Carolina, daughter of an enslaved mother and a father the census would later record as a French-born planter. She married Alexander C. Fisher of Mobile, Alabama, bore eleven children, and in the late 1870s the family crossed the country — through Missouri, where one child was born — to San Francisco.

There her kitchen became a business in her own name: Mrs. Abby Fisher and Company, pickles and preserves, on Howard Street. The 1879 Sacramento State Fair gave her its diploma; the 1880 Mechanics' Institute Fair gave her two medals — bronze for her pickles and sauces, silver for the best assortment of jellies and preserves — a formerly enslaved woman out-preserving the whole of white San Francisco.

In 1881 the Women's Co-operative Printing Office set down What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking — one hundred and sixty recipes she dictated, for she had never been permitted to read or write, to nine friends whose names the book gratefully keeps. For a century scholarship called it the first cookbook by an African American, until Malinda Russell's 1866 book resurfaced; it stands now as the second known, and the first known by a Black woman west of the Mississippi. Lost for generations, a copy surfaced at auction in 1984, and Karen Hess's annotated facsimile carried Mrs. Fisher's table back into the world's kitchens.

Of her death the record keeps an honest silence: she disappears from the city's directories after the 1890s, and no source records the date. What survives is better than a date — the recipes, in her own dictated voice. Honored be Abby Fisher, who could not write and authored a classic.