Customer Reviews

What Mrs. Fisher Knows About So. Cooking (Cooking in America)

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As soon as I learned of this book's existence, I ordered a copy for myself. I love cooking (and cookbooks), and I am also fascinated by the kind of first-person, anecdotal history that can be derived from the writings or records of ordinary people living long ago. This work--the first cookbook by an African-American, actually a former slave, originally published in 1881-- appeals to both of those interests, and, in addition, is a curious little conversation piece to display on a bookshelf. The recipes are not ones you will turn to each night when making dinner, but they are fun to experiment with, as long as you rewrite the directions first in their proper order (they are written in a stream-of-consciousness style), and as long as you read the historical notes that define the units of measure used in the recipes. This book could be a great guide for a "historical reinactment" of a Civil War era dinner, or, if not, then it is at least a selective culinary history of the Old South. Most interesting to me are the medicinal recipes, like blackberry syrup as a remedy for dysentery, and the recipe for "infant diet." This edition contains not only the original cookbook, but an informative afterword that explains some historical facts about Mrs. Fisher and the society around her. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in American history, African-American history, or the art of cooking.

"What Mrs. Fisher Knows" is a charming antique and should be read by anyone with an interest in African-American or Southern cookery, or anyone who would like to re-create authentic 19th century American cuisine.

This reprint of "What Mrs. Fisher Knows" was brought into being by Karen Hess. Hess has provided an informative introduction to the recipes (which are reproduced in their entirety), explaining many 19th century cooking concepts which may be unfamiliar to the modern cook and providing as much of Abby Fisher's story as can be found. In Fisher's original text it is interesting to see some of the earliest known written recipes for several dishes and to discover others which are almost unknown today. Fisher's original recipes are typical of 19th century (and earlier) cookbooks. Each recipe is several sentences in a single paragraph, with no separate ingredient list. In many cases it is assumed that the cook will know how to prepare something that is taken as a given in the recipe. This is a cookbook from a time when all cooking was "from scratch", when there were few labor-saving kitchen gadgets, and printed books were luxury items. It is not a step-by-step cookbook. [For that, see Chef Paul Prudhomme or Southern Living.]

"Good Things to Eat" by Rufus Estes is sometimes called the first cookbook written by an African-American. "What Mrs. Fisher Knows" was published thirty years earlier. (It could be said that Mrs. Fisher, a former slave, did not actually "write" the book as she evidently did not know how to write; she dictated the recipes to a member of the Women's Cooperative Printing Office in San Francisco which published the work in 1881.)

(The editor, Karen Hess has done similar work on Mary Randolph's "The Virginia Housewife" and "Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats".)

This book goes into my historical collection of recipes, many are more simple than contemporary recipes.

Thanks for publishing WHAT MRS. FISHER KNOWS ABOUT OLD SOUTHERN COOKING. As an African-American teacher, I appreciate African-American history. On our Christmas program, one of my kindergarten students displayed the book while explaining that Mrs. Abbey Fisher has two recipes for pound cake in the book and pound cake is an antebellum holiday food. Mrs. Fisher's pound cake recipes are on page twenty-eight; one is called the Gold cake and the other is the Silver cake. The class ate pound cake at the Christmas party. The class party setting was Goose Creek Plantation at Charleston South Carolina in 1859. The student also told that the book was published in 1881, and Mrs. Fisher was a former slave who could not read or write. But she dicated her recipes for friends to write down. After the Civil War ended slavery she left Mobile, Alabama and went to San Francisco where her book was published. Since I grew up in Mobile, I was more than thrilled to get this historic book. Another teacher ordered two of the books; one he gave to a friend for Christmas.

This is more than a cookbook (because most recipes you can't recreate), it is a historical account of life as a slave cook.

The recipes are cleverly presented but they consist of brief summaries or notes about cooking.