MALINDA RUSSELL’S A Domestic Cookbook, published in 1866, is celebrated as the first cookbook by an African American author, but it has another distinction as the earliest known published collection of recipes from the southern Appalachians. As such, it stands as a document to the southern mountaineers’ love of gingerbread.
Amelia Simmons’s cookbook, (1796), the first published in the United States, has four recipes for gingerbread/cakes. Mary Randolph’s (1824), which Russell identifies as a primary source of her culinary education, has three, and (1881) has one for cake and one for cookies. But Russell’s book, which records recipes that she made and served and sold at her Chuckey Mountain, Tennessee, boarding house and later at her bakery, contains 10 different
