Malinda Russell: She Called Them Receipts First

The first known cookbook by a Black woman in America was Malinda Russell's. And one copy, found in a box of old books, is the only reason we have her name today.

I want you to know it. Malinda Russell.

1866. Paw Paw, Michigan. A free woman of color puts out a thin book, 39 pages in a paper cover. She calls it A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen.

Receipts. Her word. Fifteen years before Abby Fisher, the woman who carried the title of first until Malinda's book turned up. Malinda Russell was first.

A free woman tells her story

Here's what most people get wrong about her before they know anything else. She was never enslaved. She was born free in East Tennessee, in Washington County, and raised in Greene County. Her mother's family were among the first people freed by a Virginian she names as Mr. Noddie. And unlike Abby Fisher, who had to dictate her book, Malinda Russell could read and write. She wrote that cookbook herself, with her own life story printed right up front.

That story stops you cold.

At about nineteen she set out to leave America altogether, for Liberia. She traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, carrying a letter vouching for her character, ready to sail. A fellow traveler robbed her of everything. She never made the crossing.

So she stayed in Lynchburg and went to work, as a nurse and a traveling companion. And there she learned her trade from a Black cook named Fanny Steward, a woman freed by her Virginia master. They cooked by the standard of the day, Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife. Malinda took that standard and made it her own.

She married a man named Anderson Vaughn. They had a son who didn't have the use of one hand. Four years in, her husband died. She took in washing to keep her and her boy alive.

A business of her own

Then she built.

Back in Tennessee she ran a boarding house on Chuckey Mountain, near Cold Spring, for three years. Then a pastry shop, for about six, and it did well. Pastry was her gift. Open her book today and at least a hundred of the receipts are sweets: rose cake, floating island, puff pastry, lemon puffs, French lady cake, a bride's cake that calls for 24 eggs. She wrote that "a great many ladies have wished to know how I have such good success making my cakes so light."

And she wasn't just a baker. There's catfish fricassee in there. Sweet onion custard. Irish potatoes with cod. Plus the things a working woman in the 1800s needed and nobody else was going to write down for her: ointments, shampoo, cologne, remedies for a toothache, for corns, for dropsy.

Read how she writes a recipe. "One pound flour. One ditto butter. Nine eggs. Two quarts milk. A little yeast mixed together warm." That's it. She's writing for people who already know how to cook. That is not poverty food. That is a professional's shorthand.

The second robbery

Now here's the second robbery.

In 1864, in the middle of the war, a guerrilla party came for her in Tennessee. They robbed her, took the savings that supported her and her son, and threatened her life. She ran. She had heard Michigan called the "garden of the west," and that's where she took her boy, to Paw Paw.

Two thefts, and the second one is the reason the book exists. She wrote it to get back on her feet and earn her way home to Greeneville. "This is one reason why I publish my Cook Book," she wrote. And she believed in it: "I know my book will sell well where I have cooked, and am sure those using my receipts will be well satisfied."

The missing record

Then she disappears.

After May of 1866, Malinda Russell drops out of the record. Within months a fire tore through Paw Paw. Nobody knows how many copies of her book sold, or whether she ever made it home. For more than a hundred years her book simply wasn't there. When Abby Fisher's 1881 book resurfaced in the 1980s, Abby got called the first by default. Not because Abby took it. Because Malinda's proof was missing.

That's the machine at its quietest. Nobody had to burn her name. They just never kept it.

The book returns

Until 2000. The culinary historian Janice Bluestein Longone bought the book from a rare-book dealer named Janet Jarvits, opened it, and understood what she was holding. She wrote about it in the food journal Gastronomica in 2001, then spent about seven years chasing Malinda Russell through census records and archives. In 2007 she published a facsimile edition and held a symposium at the University of Michigan's Clements Library. The original is now in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan, and as far as anyone knows, it's the only copy left on earth.

In February 2025 the University of Michigan Press published a new edition, with a foreword by the scholar Rafia Zafar, and made it free to read online. "We know sadly little about her," Zafar says. "She's widowed early. She has a handicapped child. She starts her own business. She has a pastry shop."

So now we know her name. A free woman who got robbed twice, buried her husband, raised her son, ran two businesses, and wrote her life and her craft down in her own words. Her cakes are coming out of ovens again; the Virginia Museum of History & Culture baked her ginger drop cake on camera for its Recipes Remade series. Her receipts are open to anybody with a phone.

The receipt

So here it is. For everybody. Now you know.

One copy was all it took. She called them receipts before any of us did.

Know her name. Malinda Russell. Tell a person and share the receipt.

The Receipts R the Recipe.

Sources & Further Reading

• Malinda Russell, A Domestic Cook Book (1866) — University of Michigan Press open-access edition (2025), foreword by Rafia Zafar, introduction by Janice Bluestein Longone
• NPR (via GPB) — on the 2025 edition of Malinda Russell's cookbook
• Atlas Obscura — What I Learned About a Pioneering Black Cookbook Author by Cooking Her Recipes
• Malinda Russell — biography and rediscovery
• University of Michigan Library — Malinda Russell's Domestic Cook Book panel, February 27, 2025