Mary Randolph did not writeThe Virginia Housewifein order to speak both back across Southern history and forward to what would become, broadly speaking, “Southern cuisine.” But in many respects, that is exactly what she did. Published in 1824, Randolph’sVirginia Housewifeis considered by some to be the first truly American cookbook as well as the first regional cookery book. It reflects ingredients indigenous to the Americas as well as the peculiar nature of plantation cooking.¹ Before the publication of Randolph’s text, American cookbooks had relied largely on English traditions. In fact many “American” cookbooks published in the...

The antebellum South was nothing if not agricultural. In fact, thanks to its vast farmlands, mild weather, and massive, enslaved workforce, the antebellum South was one of the most productive agricultural regions in history. The cotton gin, invented in 1792, had made it fast and easy to comb out seeds from cotton, just as early factories in the North were starting to spin cotton and weave it into cloth at high speed. Between the advent of the cotton gin and the eve of the Civil War, cotton boomed. It exploded through the Deep South and into the West, remaking the...

First published in 1824,The Virginia Housewifeis the earliest formally published Southern cookbook. And it is very Southern, with recipes for barbecued hog and gumbo, lima beans and hominy, corn bread and bacon, field peas and sweet potatoes. But look closer and you’ll see the book plays against type, too, revealing how incredibly varied the food was that elite Southerners were eating in the nineteenth century. For every recipe for fried chicken, there are a half dozen more like baked mutton or pork with pease pudding or calf’s feet fricassee. For every recipe for drop biscuits there are pages...

One of the most revealing glimpses into how eating and cooking changed during the Civil War comes from Southern periodicals. Aimed at planters and yeomen farmers, these periodicals had been an important source of information before the war on everything from farming to slave keeping to domestic management. Once the war started, they became an invaluable source of information on changing food conditions. In most of the periodicals, recipes and articles on food had never appeared in special sections aimed at women, but rather mixed in with everything else. But if categories of cultivating, preserving, and cooking food had always...

The only Southern cookbook to be formally published during the Civil War, theConfederate Receipt Bookplainly said it was “adapted to the times.”¹ The times were hard, and the book reflects that on almost every page. Like most nineteenth-century cookbooks, it combined culinary recipes with general housekeeping hints. But unlike a traditional cookbook, this slim book—reproduced here in its entirety—focused almost exclusively on making things on the cheap, getting by without normal staples, and making the most of every crumb.

Some of the recipes were specifically intended for men in the war. For example, there are hints...

Written in elegant script on paper that is now thin and yellowed, this manuscript of handwritten recipes from the Civil War–era South has never been published before. It would be a rare and valuable source no matter where it was written, but it is especially interesting because much of it was apparently written in northern Maryland, revealing a South that extended fifty miles north of the U.S. capital. The geography of Confederate loyalty was no secret at the time: Maryland was a deeply divided border state. Some Maryland residents were loyal to the Union and felt an economic affinity...

Published two years after the end of the Civil War but written in the middle of it,Dixie Cookeryis widely considered the first North Carolina cookbook. It was written by Maria Barringer, a woman from a prosperous family in western North Carolina.¹ In the nineteenth century, authors routinely started books by explaining or even apologizing for bothering the world with another book, and this was especially true when the authors were women. An elite Southern woman publishing a book was no everyday event in 1867, and true to form, Maria Barringer felt the need to explain why she had...

Like many women in the nineteenth century, Annabella Hill married young and bore many children. Born Annabella Dawson in Georgia in 1810, she married a man named Edward Hill when she was seventeen years old. She eventually had eleven children, five of whom died in childhood.¹ By the mid-1840s, Edward Hill had become a judge and the family was living in a small town called LaGrange, Georgia, while also managing a plantation in the country nearby. They almost certainly owned slaves.² The early 1860s were hard for Hill. Her husband died in 1860, and then two of her three remaining...

What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cookinghas become a famous cookbook, and rightly so. It is one of the very earliest full-length cookbooks written by an African American, after Malinda Russell’s 1866Domestic Cook Book.¹ Unlike Russell, who was a free woman, Abby Fisher apparently spent much of her life in slavery. She was born in South Carolina in the early 1830s, and she would have been about thirty-three when the Civil War ended. Later she was identified in the U.S. Census as a “mulatto” whose mother was born in South Carolina and whose father was born in...