The Library After Dark

Food History

The Virginia Housewife

by Mary Randolph

Mary Randolph kept a well-known boarding house in Richmond, and her book of 1824 is often called the first regional American cookbook. Gumbo, okra soup and catfish are among its recipes, drawn from English, French, Spanish and African cooking. In houses like hers the cooking was largely done by enslaved people, whose names the book does not give.

The librarian
Read it in the Library After Dark Or read it as plain text
Reading time
About 3 hr 5 min
Where to find it
On the Food History shelves
Edition
Project Gutenberg, eBook #12519. In the public domain in the United States.

Also on the Food History shelves