What Mrs. Fisher Knew

She couldn't read the menu. She couldn't write her own name.

But in 1881 she published a cookbook, and nearly a century and a half later people are still cooking out of it.

I want you to know her name. Abby Fisher.

Look at the title she gave it. Not Mrs. Fisher's Recipes. Not A Few Old Dishes. She called it What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. That's a woman staking a claim. Knows. Present tense. Her knowledge, her name on the cover.

Abby Fisher builds a life and a business

Here's who she was.

The records put her birth around 1831, in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her mother was enslaved and her father was a white man; the census later listed him as French. In South Carolina back then, a child took the status of her mother, so Abby came into the world as somebody's property. Around 1860 she married Alexander C. Fisher, and by then she was living in Mobile, Alabama. In her own words she cooked for "upwards of thirty-five years," and she raised a big family on that cooking. In the book, under a recipe for infant food, she wrote: "I have given birth to eleven children and raised them all, and nursed them with this diet."

Around 1877 the Fishers went West, to San Francisco. And she didn't go to work in somebody else's kitchen. She went into business. Pickles and preserves. By 1882 she was listed on her own, separate from her husband, as a pickle and preserve manufacturer: Mrs. Abby Fisher & Co. Her husband worked as a porter. Her business ran until about 1890, out of 436 27th Street in the Noe Valley neighborhood.

The food wins

Then she did something most people would never have expected from a Black woman just out of the South. She entered her food in competition, against every cook in California.

In 1879 the California State Fair in Sacramento gave her a diploma, its highest award. In 1880, at the 15th annual Mechanics' Institute Fair in San Francisco, she took two medals: a bronze for the best pickles and sauces, and a silver for the best assortment of jellies and preserves. The judges wrote that "her pickles and sauces have a piquancy and flavor seldom equaled, and, when once tasted, not soon forgotten."

That's what did it. Friends and customers tasted those wins and kept after her. Put it in a book.

One problem. She couldn't read or write a word of it.

So she talked, and friends wrote it down. A hundred and sixty receipts, spoken out loud, printed in 1881 by the Women's Co-operative Printing Office in San Francisco. Okra gumbo, where she tells you to "never stir rice while boiling." Chow chow. Brandied peaches. A blackberry syrup she called an "old Southern plantation home remedy among colored people." Pickles and preserves page after page, the same food that won the medals. She even told you who the book was for: it "will be found a complete instructor, so that a child can understand it and learn the art of cooking."

A woman the law never let learn to read, writing a book so plain a child could learn from it. Sit with that.

The book goes quiet

Now here's what happened to it.

The book went quiet. For about a century, almost nobody knew it existed, not even the people who study American cookbooks for a living. Then in 1984 a copy came up at a Sotheby's auction in New York. The Schlesinger Library at Harvard, which collects the history of American women, bought it. The food historian Karen Hess was in the room, and the price was too high for her to even get her hands on it. So she pushed for it to come back into print, and in 1995 Applewood Books reprinted it with her historical notes. By the publisher's count, only about a hundred copies had survived before that.

That's how close it came. A woman who won the top prizes in California, who ran her own company, who put her name on a book, and her proof came down to a handful of copies and one auction.

Who came first

And when it did come back, the world handed her a crown she didn't need: the first cookbook by a Black woman in America. It wasn't even that. Fifteen years earlier, in 1866, Malinda Russell had already published one. Hers got buried even deeper.

That's the machine. It's not one theft. It's a pattern. The hands build the food, and the names go missing, so completely that we can't even keep straight who came first.

Back on the table

But the receipt survived.

Today her whole book sits in Michigan State University's Feeding America archive of historic American cookbooks. In 2014, Smithsonian curator Amanda Moniz cooked her chow chow. The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, has served her recipes at a food stand called Mrs. Fisher's. Her okra gumbo, her preserves, her voice, all back on the table.

The receipt

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

She couldn't write her own name. So it's on the cover, it's in the archive, and it's in the kitchen.

Know her name. Abby Fisher. Tell a person and share the receipt.

The Receipts R the Recipe.

Sources & Further Reading

• Atlas Obscura — "Celebrating Abby Fisher, One of the First African-American Cookbook Authors"
• Abby Fisher — biography, family and business records
• What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking — publication, rediscovery and reprints
• Abby Fisher, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881; Applewood Books, 1995, with historical notes by Karen Hess)
• Michigan State University Libraries — Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project