Malinda Russell

Malinda Russell was born about 1812 in Washington County, Tennessee, and raised in neighboring Greene County. She was a free Black woman, never enslaved; as she wrote in the opening of her own book, her mother was among the first people freed by a Virginia enslaver named Noddie. Descended from Virginia free people, Russell grew up in the free Black community of East Tennessee.

As a young woman she set out to emigrate to Liberia, but when her savings were stolen she was stranded in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she worked as a cook, nurse, and traveling companion. Widowed after a short marriage, she returned to Tennessee with her son. There she kept a boarding house on Chuckey Mountain, near Cold Spring, and later built a thriving pastry-and-confectionery shop, earning her living by her skill in the kitchen over some two decades.

In 1864, after her Tennessee home was raided by a marauding gang, Russell fled north with her son to Paw Paw, Michigan. In 1866 she self-published "A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen" — the first cookbook known to be authored by an African American. Its roughly 260 receipts, from soups and roasts to pastries and remedies, distilled a lifetime of professional cooking, and she offered it hoping to earn passage back home to Tennessee.

Soon after publication a fire swept Paw Paw, and the trail of her life goes quiet; her later years and death are undocumented. A single surviving copy of her book, preserved in the University of Michigan's Longone Culinary Archive, carried her voice forward. We honor Malinda Russell — a free woman who set the table for generations and wrote her name first into American culinary history.