Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos!
Three years ago we put out a video about the word “Recipe”, and we recently revisited
that script for another presentation. In doing so, we found some further material about the
earliest African American cookbooks and women’s magazines that we thought was fascinating,
so we’re sharing it with you here in an endnote. It also connects to the research
I’m currently doing for two upcoming videos.
In 1866 Malinda Russell, a free Black woman who had run a pastry shop in Tennessee, published
the Domestic Cook Book. This is the first known cookbook published by an African American,
though it was forgotten for a long time and only rediscovered in 2000. Most of the recipes
in it were for elegant desserts and European-style main courses, with none of the foods traditionally
accepted as Southern cuisine. She also provided recipes for ointments and colognes, as well
as household tips. In 1881 Abbey Fisher, a formerly enslaved woman, published What Mrs.
Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, which was thought to be the first cookbook by a
Black woman until Russell’s book was rediscovered. This book documents a much longer tradition
of Black cooking in the US that is generally now known as ‘Soul Food’. This cuisine,
a melding of various African culinary traditions with European and Native American foods, often
shaped by the privations and oppressions of enslavement, had been passed down orally,
since enslaved people were often prevented from learning to write. In fact Abbey Fisher
dictated the recipes in her book so that they could be transcribed, because she couldn’t
read or write. By publishing books, these women were claiming a type of authority long
denied to them. Indeed recipe books historically were one kind of authority, but there has
always been another thread of the ‘authority of experience’, that is the generations
of (primarily) women who learned cooking from relatives.
By the way, the term soul food is first attested in print in its current sense in 1960, and
became popular with the rise of the Black Power movement, though the phrase soul food
had been used to mean “food for the soul” or in other words “spiritual nourishment”
as far back as Old English. The word soul, or Old English sawol “spiritual and emotional
part of a person, animate existence, life, living being”, is a Germanic word of uncertain
ultimate etymology, but a connection between Proto-Germanic *saiwalō “soul” and *saiwaz
“sea”has been suggested as a reflection of the supposed Germanic belief that the soul
came from and after death returned to the sea, so soul would originally have meant something
like “coming from or belonging to the sea”. Soul gained its specific African American
sense in the early 20th century, being attested in 1920 in the phrase soul music in reference
to a type of jazz, but what we think of now as soul music, a blend of gospel and rhythm
& blues, is a product of the late 1950s and early 60s, something I’ll talk more about
in my next two videos, as it happens. The word soul on its own in the sense “the emotional
or spiritual quality of African American life and culture”, though again with the specific
reference to music, is first attested in 1946 in Ebony magazine, founded in 1945 by African
American businessman and publisher John H. Johnson, who wanted to create a platform to
present African American issues and people in a positive and self-affirming manner.
And that connects nicely to the other topic I wanted to talk about – the early history
of Black women’s magazines. Between 1891 and 1950 there were 8 African American women’s
magazines published for a variety of audiences and purposes. Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal
of Fashion was started by Julia Ringwood Coston in 1891 and was aimed at providing what the
editors saw as ‘culture’ to a readership that considered themselves or wanted to become
‘intellectual’. Woman’s Voice was started in 1912 and was one of a group of magazines
giving advice to African American women moving to cities and entering consumerist cultures,
focussing on fashion and domestic life. Our Women and Children, founded by William J.
Simmons in 1888 and Aframerican Woman’s Journal founded in 1935 by Sue Bailey Thurman,
were periodicals that attempted to speak to specific political, domestic, or religious
aspirations on the part of an African American female readership. Unlike the predominantly
male-run white women’s magazines, all of these were owned or edited by Black women;
but that didn’t make them free of the impulse to instruct their readership in how best to
live: as the author Noliwe Rooks puts it, “each of the publications attempted to educate
a migrant population about the requirements and expectations for societal acceptance in
an unfamiliar urban area and used this rationale to explain its existence. What African American
women wore, bought, read, cooked, ate, and did at home with their families were all fair
game, and each magazine offered copious advice and analysis about what such choices could
and did mean.” Sometimes this advice was implicitly or explicitly aimed at getting
Black women to conform to white standards of beauty, respectability, sexuality, domesticity,
etc. This was in part because of class; they were run by elite Black ‘ladies’ who were
urging lower class Black women to acquire the ‘skills, demeanor, clothing, behaviors,
and attitudes’ that would distance them from their history of enslavement and sexual
abuse and contemporary stereotypes–among both white and Black men–about Black female
sexuality. So, like those early cookbooks, we can again see these magazines as a way
for Black women to reclaim authority over their own story.
As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a
wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast
platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!