"Soul Food & Early Black Women’s Writing: The Endnotes" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

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!