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An Ex-Slave's Award-Winning Cookbook
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Fisher couldn’t read or write. But her skills in the kitchen didn’t go unnoticed
by the high-society women in post-Civil War San Francisco for whom she worked as a cook.
Her concoctions also won raves from food judges at county fairs.
Fisher, a former slave from Mobile, Alabama, was awarded a diploma at
the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and won two medals – for best pickles and sauces
and best assortment of jellies and preserves -- at the San Francisco Mechanics Institute
Fair in 1880. |
What Mrs.
Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking: Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.
(Women’s Cooperative Printing Office, San
Francisco, 1881)
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Some of her patrons persuaded Fisher to dictate the recipes she carried
in her head so that they could be written down and passed on to others. The result was one
of the first cookbooks by an African American, "What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old
Southern Cooking: Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.," published by the Women’s
Cooperative Printing Office in San Francisco in 1881.
It is clear that cheap labor was plentiful in the Old South where Fisher
had grown up. The pickled watermelon rind recipe reprinted below takes days to complete.
In contrast, the watermelon rind recipe in "Stocking Up: The Third Edition of the
Classic Preserving Guide," calls for much the same ingredients. But it can be
completed in under an hour -- with an intervening overnight wait while the blanched rind
sits in syrup before being canned and processed in a hot water bath.
Harried gourmets of the present day might find Mrs. Fisher’s jumble
cake recipe, also reprinted below, more practical. It can be whipped together in minutes.
Sweet
Watermelon
Rind Pickle
Take the melon rind and scrape all the meat from the
inside, and then carefully slice all the outside of the rind from the white part of the
rind, then lay or cover the white part over with salt. It will have to remain under salt
one week before pickling; the rind will keep in salt from year to year. When you want to
pickle it, take it from the salt and put into clear water, change the water three times a
day –must be changed say every four hours – then take the rind from the water
and dry it with a clean cloth. Have your vinegar boiling, and put the rind into it and let
it lay in vinegar four days; then take it from the vinegar, drain, and sprinkle sugar
thickly over it and let it remain so one day. To make syrup, take the syrup from the rind
and add eight pounds more sugar to it, and put to boil; boil till a thick and clear syrup.
Weigh ten pounds of rind to 12 pounds of sugar; cover the rind with four pounds of it and
make the syrup with the remaining eight pounds. While the syrup is cooking add one
teacupful of white ginger root and the peel of three lemons. When the syrup is cooked,
then put the rind into the boiling syrup, and let it cook till you can pass a fork through
it with ease, then it is done. When cooled, put in jar or bottles with one pint of vinegar
to one quart of syrup, thus the pickles are made. See that they be well covered with
vinegar and syrup as directed."
Jumble Cake
One teacup of butter, one and one-half teacups of sugar,
one and one-half pints of flour; four eggs, two teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, one-half teacup
of almonds chopped fine, two teaspoonfuls of yeast powder sifted in the flour. Beat the
butter, sugar and eggs together, then add the flour. Put cinnamon and almonds in and work
the whole up well, then roll on the board to thickness of half an inch, and cut out a
finger’s length and join together at ends, so as to be round. Grease pans with butter
and put to bake.
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