A 19th-Century Ghost Awakens to Redefine ‘Soul’

By Molly O'Neill, marxist-leninist-list, 1 December 2007

For nearly seven years Jan Longone, an antiquarian cookbook collector, has been haunted by a ghost. The spirit came into her life as thousands of other vintage volumes from book dealers had before: in a plain brown wrapper. But as soon as she held Malinda Russell's “Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen,” she could see its author and her world—the small, seldom-discussed society of free blacks in the 19th century—coming to life before her eyes.

“I felt like an archaeologist who had just stumbled on a dinosaur,” said Mrs. Longone, who is the curator of American culinary history at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “I was in awe.”

Mrs. Longone, long considered the top expert on old American cookbooks, knew immediately that she was holding the earliest cookbook by an African-American woman that had ever come to light. Turning the 39 fragile pages of the 1866 pamphlet, she realized, too, that it could challenge ingrained views about the cuisine of African-Americans.

The black liberation movement of the 1960's had celebrated “soul food”: dishes with a debt to Africa, like black-eyed peas, greens, gumbo and fried chicken. Neither the activists nor the scholars who later devoted themselves to black studies intended those dishes to be seen as the food on the stove of every black cook in America. But that is exactly what happened, historians say.

“Southern poverty cooking was mistakenly established as the single and universal African-American cuisine,” said Leni Sorensen, a researcher at Monticello outside Charlottesville, Va., specializing in African-American history.

And then the volume by Malinda Russell surfaced.

The evidence of a single cookbook is not enough to rewrite culinary history. Still, Mrs. Russell's book suggested that a more nuanced view might be in order. Instead of rustic Southern “soul food,” it served up complex, cosmopolitan food inspired by European cuisine.

Mrs. Russell, who had operated a pastry shop in Tennessee, provided mostly dessert recipes, but they were for puff pastry and delicate rose cake, not sweet potato pie. Her savory recipes included dishes like an elegant catfish fricassee and sweet onion custard—not a mention of lard-fried chicken legs, beaten biscuits or slow-cooked greens. Here was a black cook who was already two generations removed from the plantation kitchen by the time Lincoln died.

And what seemed even more remarkable to Mrs. Longone was Mrs. Russell's voice and the brief first-person account that she provided of her life. “I found myself straining to hear her voice, and trying to talk to her,” Mrs. Longone said. “She had such an American story, and it seemed like her message was timeless.”

Mrs. Longone soon became obsessed with finding Malinda Russell. And that is when the heartache began.

Old cookbooks, particularly small, privately published ones, can provide an intimate portrait of cultures and places and eras. But their authors tend to be unknown women who leave no record other than their own words. Such women can be all but impossible to track down, particularly if they were African-Americans who lived at a time when the births and marriages and deaths of black people were recorded haphazardly, if at all.

Mrs. Longone was undaunted. Mrs. Russell, she reasoned, had provided many clues. She wrote of having been born and raised in eastern Tennessee and of being a member of one of the first families set free by a Mr. Noddie of Virginia. She said she had joined a party that intended to resettle in Liberia, but after one of its members robbed her she had been forced, instead, to remain in Lynchburg, Va. There, she worked as a cook and lady's companion and married a man named Anderson Vaughan.

Four years later, Mrs. Russell wrote, her husband died. She raised their son, who she said was crippled, while running a laundry in Virginia and, later, a boarding house and pastry shop on Chuckey Mountain in Tennessee.

With this information, Mrs. Longone, who had worked as a rural sociologist early in her career, was sure she could pick up Mrs. Russell's trail. Her husband, Dan Longone, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, shared her conviction.

In the summer of 2002, the couple spent their 48th wedding anniversary trip chasing reports of Malinda, Mylinda, Melinda and Russel, Rusell, Russell in town halls, cemeteries, newspapers and historical societies across Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. They also began riding a seesaw of exhilarating hope and crashing disappointment.

“We'd get a lead that seemed solid and go zooming off to study the evidence,” Mrs. Longone said. “But as soon as we saw the documents, we'd find that the woman of record was either too old or too young to be our Malinda, and we'd just be crushed.”

After returning to Ann Arbor, they continued spending their evenings studying census reports and genealogies, searching archives for recipes that might be antecedents of Mrs. Russell's and consulting academics and amateur food historians across the country.

Their efforts speak to both the limits and the possibilities of using cookbooks to understand history.

“Since food is not written about in charters and treaties, the historian has to go back to primary sources, to letters, travel accounts, diaries and genealogy,” said Sandy Oliver, the publisher of Food History News in Islesboro, Me. “It's the most painstaking research there is, and even then it is all but impossible to find the beginnings of things, and no cookbook alone can provide an accurate view of African- American food ways in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Scholars who studied early books by blacks—like “The House Servant's Directory,” by Robert Roberts, published in 1827, and Tunis G. Campbell's 1848 “Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters and Housekeepers' Guide”—tended to see their blend of Yankee, European and Southern recipes as a reflection of who was being served more than who was doing the serving. The plantation kitchen recipes in books like “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” by Abby Fisher (1881), who was born a slave, were championed by these historians as a better mirror of the African-American kitchen.

In May 2007, Mrs. Longone published a limited-edition facsimile of the only known copy of Mrs. Russell's cookbook and distributed copies at a symposium at the Longone Center for American Culinary Research, part of the Clements Library at Michigan. The volume was greeted with great emotion.

“It is an Emancipation Proclamation for black cooks,” said Toni Tipton-Martin, a journalist and food historian in Austin, Tex., who has spent a decade researching the cooking of African-American women.

“In isolation, Malinda's book might appear to be an aberration,” she said. But in the context of the black- written cookbooks that followed, many of which reflected a sophisticated international kitchen, Mrs. Russell's cookbook “dispels the notion of a universal African-American food experience, which is why the term 'soul food' doesn't work for so many of us,” she said.

The release of the facsimile (copies of which are available for $25 plus postage from the Clements Library, _www.clements.umich.edu/culinary_ (http://www.clements.umich.edu/culinary) or 734-764-2347) also brought new leads. One of them sent the Longones west this summer to Paw Paw, Mich., Malinda Russell's last-known whereabouts.

After eight years of running the boarding house and pastry shop in Tennessee, Mrs. Russell wrote, she had “by hard labor and economy, saved a considerable sum of money for the support of myself and my son.” But then in 1864, she was robbed again, this time “by a guerrilla party,” she wrote, “who threatened my life if I revealed who they were.” Taking her son, she fled north to Paw Paw.

The Longones felt that familiar frisson of hope as they drove into the town.

And they felt the familiar sinking of hope when they learned that within months of the publication of Mrs. Russell's book, the little town had been all but destroyed by a fire. They found no trace of her.

Locating the woman they call Malinda seems, therefore, increasingly unlikely. But to the Longones, abandoning the search is unthinkable.

“Our needle in the haystack gets smaller and smaller,” Mrs. Longone said softly, “but we'll find her. She wants to be found, and we got some great new leads.”