Malinda Russell

[4] When her Tennessee home was raided by traveling gangs of whites in 1864, she fled with her son to Paw Paw, Michigan, where she published the first known cookbook by a black woman, Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, as a means to provide income for her and her son and earn money to return [2] to Greeneville, Tennessee.

[7] Russell self-published her book, in 1866, giving a brief history of her life[7] and stating in the preface to it that she hoped to earn passage to return home from its proceeds.

[8] Most of the recipes were for elegant desserts, like floating island,[9] puff pastry and rose cake, along with main course dishes like catfish fricassee,[10] Irish potatoes with cod,[9] and sweet onion custard, containing none of the soul food traditionally accepted as Southern cuisine.

[10] In 2000, the Domestic Cook Book was purchased by Jan Longone, an antique cookbook collector and curator of American culinary history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's William L. Clements Library from Janet Jarvits, a cookbook dealer who had purchased the book collection of Helen Evans Brown.

[7][12] Longone realized that it was the first known cookbook written by an African American woman and spent the next seven years researching and trying to piece together Russell's history.

[7] Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book is now held by the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center as part of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive.