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Enslaved people in South Carolina in the process of being freed by the federal government around 1862. Abby Fisher was born and raised on a South Carolina plantation, but after gaining her freedom, found success in San Francisco.
(Henry P. Moore)
O
nce Abby Fisher had made a name for herself in 1870s San Francisco, the award-winning Southern chef and businesswoman was bombarded with requests for her recipes. Fisher was more than happy to share over three decades of cookery know-how with her fans. But because Fisher was born enslaved and raised on a South Carolina plantation, she never had access to a formal education; she could neither read nor write.
African Americans have substantially influenced so many different areas of our society. During Black History Month, we honor the achievements of African American leaders, activists, teachers, entrepreneurs, artists and athletes, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, Madame CJ Walker, Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson.
This month, you ve heard from fellow leaders of the Tyson Foods African Ancestry Alliance Business Resource Group as we have shared information to continue building awareness and understanding around the contributions of African Americans, both past and present.
This week, we d like to introduce you to some lesser-known African American figures who have made lasting impressions on the food industry: chef and cookbook author Abby Fisher, and inventors Lloyd August Hall and Frederick McKinley Jones.
In 1866, Malinda Russell self-published
A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. The book holds the distinction of being the first known, cookbook published by an African American, and the first book to offer culinary advice by an African-American woman (
The House Servant’s Directory by Robert Roberts and
Never Let People Be Kept Waiting, a hotel management textbook by Tunis G. Campbell, precede it). But it’s remarkable for other reasons, too. Russell published it as a free woman living in Paw Paw, Michigan, as a fundraising effort to return to Tennessee, where she was born and raised. As Toni Tipton-Martin describes in her 2015 book