My alma mater, The University of Michigan, has published a new edition of “A Domestic Cook Book,” the oldest known published cookbook (1866) written by an African American woman, Malinda Russell, who was born in Tennessee and descended from Virginia freemen. She worked as a cook, ran a boarding house then a pastry shop and finally moved to Paw Paw Michigan and decided to compile a cookbook.

This new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by the late food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualize Russell’s cookbook. Using the only known copy of the original book housed in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections Research Center, this new edition preserves an important part of Michigan and American history and makes it widely available to readers for the first time.

Here is how you can buy the new edition or access it for free: https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/A-Domestic-Cook-Book