Black History Month: Pioneers in Food

The food industry would not be where it is today were it not for the contribution of African Americans.

This year for Black History Month, I am highlighting just 14 of the hundreds of people who used their talents and skills to enrich American cuisine, make food cultivation safer, or became the first in their field. Some of these people achieved their feats while being enslaved. No matter from whence they came, they did not let society’s obstacles get in their way.

1. Malinda Russell (1812-?) 

In 1866, Malinda Russell became the first Black woman to publish a cookbook in the United States. She faced many obstacles. Though born free in 1812 in Tennessee, her mother passed away when she was a child. Russell attained a decent education, and at age 19 she planned to travel to Lynchburg, Virginia and then on to Liberia. However, she was robbed and arrived in Virginia penniless. She was employed as a nurse and traveling assistant to a white family. There, she learned how to cook. Russell eventually married Anderson Vaughn and had a son with him, but Vaughn passed away four years later.

She eventually moved back to Tennessee, first operating a boarding house and then successfully running a pastry shop for six years. In 1864, her home was raided buy a mob, and she fled to Paw Paw, Michigan. This is where she wrote and published “A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen” in 1866. The book gave a brief history of her life and then 265 recipes that gave a sophisticated view of Black Southern cooking that transcended the negative view that the public had of it. Sadly within months of publishing her book, the town of Paw Paw was destroyed in a fire, along with any further trace of Russell. Her book resurfaced in 2000 in in antique book collection, and it is now available for download courtesy of the University of Michigan Library.

2. Thomas Downing (1791-1866)

Thomas Downing was born free in 1791 in Virginia. His parents were freed shortly before he was born, when their masters couldn’t parse owning human beings with their Methodist faith. After a stint in the Army that brought him to Philadelphia, Downing moved to New York City to become and oysterman. He opened the Thomas Downing Oyster House at 5 Broad Street in what is now FIDI in 1825, 12 years before slavery was officially abolished in New York State. Though Oyster cellars and refectories were common businesses among free African Americans, Downing adorned his with chandeliers, drapery, and gilded mirrors, and he allowed women to dine, so long as they were accompanied by their husbands. Simple innovations like this expanded his business to 3 and 7 Broad Street.

His product was so popular that he shipped his fried and pickled oysters to the West Indies and Europe. He would be known as the Oyster King of New York. Downing founded the Anti-Slavery Society of the City of New York, used his restaurant as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and unsuccessfully sued the New York trolley system in 1838 when he was assaulted for refusing to give up his seat. Though his case failed, the precedent paved the way for a victory for Elizabeth Jennings in 1855 that desegregated the trolley system. Downing died on April 10^th, 1866, one of the wealthiest men in in New York City. He was only a legal US citizen for one day. His grandson, Philip Downing, invented the modern USPS letter box.

3. James Hemings (1765-1801)

Though James Hemings did not invent Macaroni and Cheese (it dates back to the Roman Empire), he is the man who brought it to the American table. He also introduced crème brulee to the Americas. Hemings was born enslaved to John Wayles, also his father, and “gifted” to Thomas Jefferson, along with 133 other Black people, when Jefferson married Wayles’s daughter Martha. James was the brother of Sally Hemings, the forced consort of Jefferson.

Initially serving as a valet, Jefferson took James to France with him and had him learn French culinary art. Jefferson gave Hemings a small salary while he trained which he used to learn to speak and read French. When they returned in 1787. Hemings was Monticello’s Chef de Cuisine and the first French-trained chef in the United States, despite his enslaved status. Jefferson made good on a bargain to free Hemings in 1796. In 1800, the year Jefferson was elected President, he refused the third President’s offer be the White House Chef. He cooked he last meal for the Jeffersons at Monticello in September 1801. Sadly, that winter he died by suicide in Baltimore, MD. He was 36.

4. Brenda’s Bar-B-Que

Larry James and Jereline Bethune opened the Siesta Club in 1942 in Montgomery, Alabama. They opened it at a time when Alabama was heavily segregated. After a few years, they transitioned the Siesta Club into Brenda’s Bar-B-Que Pit, named after their daughter. The Bethunes were highly active in the Civil Rights Movement; as with other Black-owned eateries, Brenda’s became a meeting place for activists and it became a hub for organization.

Larry James and Jereline Bethune were instrumental in using their restaurant to organize bus boycott efforts around the city. Jereline would tutor and teach Black people how to read to fight the racist literacy tests the state used to curtail Black people’s eligibility to vote. The spark for activism did not skip a generation, as the venue’s namesake, Brenda was on the front line at the Selma to Montgomery March. Brenda’s Bar-B-Que Pit is still open today, the oldest and longest running barbeque joint in Montgomery. The Bethunes’ children and grandchildren still own and operate it.

5. Edna Lewis (1916-2006)

Edna Lewis was known as the Grand Dame and Grand Doyenne of southern cooking. An accomplished cookbook author, she was one of the first women from the South to not hide her identity or use an alias to publish her cookbooks. She combined her love of food and African American history to teach the country the significance of southern cuisine. Lewis’s passion for cooking was born from her Freetown, Virginia roots, where she would help her family tend to her grandfather’s farm, though her first real job was as a seamstress in New York City. She became known for her African-inspired designs, dressing the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Dorcas Avedon.

Still, Lewis dreamed of becoming a chef, a dream that came true when she partnered with a friend to open and head chef the Café Nicholson in 1949. The Frnech style restaurant would serve Manhattan’s artists and celebrities, including Greta Garbo, Salvador Dali, Marlon Brando, and Eleanor Rooselvelt. In 1952, Lewis resigned as chef but remained a partner of Café Nicholson. She became a private chef and caterer and a lecturer at the American Museum of Natural History. Lewis wrote her first cookbook in 1972, called “The Edna Lewis Cookbook”. Four years later, she penned a second cookbook called “The Taste of Country Cooking”. This one included stories from her childhood with recipes related to them. This book was such a hit that it inspired a trend of cookbooks celebrating southern cuisine.

It was rare for a woman chef, especially a Black woman chef, to rise to such fame in the culinary world. In 1999, Lewis received the James Beard Living Legend Award and was named Grand Dame by Les Dames d’Escoffier International. One of her last books was 2003’s “The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks”, a collaboration with Scott Peacock, the head chef of Georgia’s governor’s mansion. Edna Lewis passed away in 2006 from cancer, just shy of her 90^th

6. Nathan Nearest Green (1820-?)

Known by his family and friends as Uncle Nearest, Nathan Nearest Green was born enslaved in Tennessee. In the 1850s he was bought by Daniel Call. On Call’s land, Green would spend his time distilling whiskey with a process that uses charcoal to filter and purify it. A neighbor, Jasper Newton Daniel, was assigned to learn Green’s method of distilling. Eventually, Daniel would make Green the head distiller in his burgeoning business, Jack Daniel’s Whiskey. When he was free in 1865, Green did wish to continue working with Daniel, though his children did.

A long line of Green’s descendants would be involved in the production of Jack Daniel’s, though credit for the Greens’ contributions weren’t made widely known until 2016, when real estate investor Fawn Weaver moved to Lynchburg, Tennessee to document Green’s life and attained thousands of documents and physical evidence proving Daniel and Green’s professional relationship. Because of her, Jack Daniel Company now publicly acknowledge Green, placing him in their headquarters hall of fame and detailing his contribution. Additionally, the company allowed Weaver to make and sell her own whiskey called “Uncle Nearest 1856”, which is one of the few Black Woman owned liquor distilleries and distributors in the country.

7. George “Crum” Speck (1824-1914) and Catherine Speck Wicks (1822-1924)

George and Catherine Speck were siblings born to an African American father and Indigenous Huron mother in Saratoga County, New York. Though little is known of their upbringing, they eventually would find employment as cooks at an aristocratic resort in Saratoga Springs, New York called Moon’s Lake House. There, a regular customer would who didn’t care to remember George’s name would call him Crum, and he adopted the name George Crum indicating that, “A crum is larger than a speck”. Between the siblings, the potato chip was invented. One story is that George, annoyed by the same regular customer’s repeated demand for his fries to be cut thinner, was fed up and cut them paper thin, and to his surprise, the customer loved them. The other story is that Catherine was shaving potatoes and accidentally dropped a sliver into a hot frying pan, and George fished it out and loved the taste.

Regardless, of its origins, Crum promoted the new snack, and Moon’s Lake house became known for its “Saratoga chips”. After the restaurant’s owner unsuccessfully tried to take credit for the invention, he began to sell them in boxes for the public. In 1869, George Crum opened his own restaurant in Malta, New York, where he provided a complementary basket of chips at each table. The chips were strictly a delicacy for the rich until Herman Lay took the chips and began mass producing them and selling them worldwide as potato chips, overshadowing the Specks’ legacy in bringing the snack to fruition. Nevertheless, George and Catherine lived long lives. George Crum would retire from the restaurant business, have three children, two wives in his life, and live to age 90. Catherine would marry and change her name to Wicks, and lived to age 102.

8. Norbert Rilieux (1806-1894)

Norbert Rillieux was born to a French engineer and an enslaved Black woman in Louisiana. He was raised a free Creole man and allowed to attend private Catholic schools, and he studied engineering in France. He became an expert in steam engines, and at age 24 became a professor at L’Ecole Central in Paris. He later returned to his father’s sugar plantation in Louisiana in the 1830s, where he revolutionized the refining of sugar, possibly saving the lives of enslaved people who did the bulk of the dangerous process.

He invented a vacuum chamber that would lower the boiling point of the juiced cane liquid and evaporate it, leaving a larger volume of higher quality refined sugar in the process. His “pan evaporator” would soon be widely used in sugar plantations throughout Louisiana, Cuba and Mexico. The invention reduced the cost, time, and hazard of processing sugar, thereby reducing the price of the product. Despite being the most sought after engineer in the South, Rillieux still faced discrimination as a Black man, and he moved back to France in 1854, where he continued to publish innovations in sugar refinery and steam power. He would later spend his life deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Norbert Rillieux died in 1894 in Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise.

9. Abby Fisher (1831-1915)

Abby Fisher was born enslaved in 1831. She became known in the 1870s for her pickles and went into business in San Francisco, founding the Mrs. Abby Fisher Pickle Company in San Francisco. In 1881, she published the cookbook “What Mrs, Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking”, making her the second Black woman to publish a cookbook in the United States, and the first former enslaved person to do so. Thought lost to time after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and fire, a copy of her book surfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in 1984 in New York City. Representatives form the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University purchased the lot and reprinted it the next year. Fisher’s book gives a glimpse into mid 1800s cooking and general life.

10. Alfred Cralle (1866-1920)

You can thank Alfred Cralle for every scoop of ice cream or sorbet you have enjoyed in your life. Born on September 4^th 1866 in Kenbridge, Virginia, Cralle always had an affinity for mechanics and would go study at Wayland Seminary to further his interests. He also apprenticed with his father as a carpenter. Cralle would move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a young adult where he worked as a porter for a pharmacy and a hotel. Here, he created the Ice Cream Mold and Disher, and one-handed device for scooping out ice cream and serving it in a cone.

Before this, servers would often have to used two spoons or utensils, making the process of putting it in a cone or even small dish cumbersome. Cralle was granted US Patent #576395 in 1897 for his invention. Despite the fast spread of his invention, he did not profit from it. However, he did become a successful promoter of businesses as the assistant manager of the Afro-American Financial, Accumulating, Merchandise, and Business Association in Pittsburgh. Cralle sadly died in 1920 in an automobile accident.

11. Frederick McKinley Jones (1893-1961)

Frederick McKinley Jones is the electrical and mechanical engineer we should thank for access to perishable foods far off lands, as well as for saving thousands of lives. At his company in partnership with Joseph Numero of Ultraphone Sound Systems, Jones invented a transportable automatic refrigeration system that could be outfitted into large trucks, train cars, and even ships. His invention, the Thermo King, quickly transformed the food industry. Grocery Chains could import products that could previously only be transported as canned or pickled goods.

The frozen food industry was born from this Jones’s invention as well. Fresh foods from around the world could be enjoyed, and Jones and Numero’s company, US Thermo Control Company, became a multimillion-dollar company by the 1940s. During World War II, Jones developed a refrigerating system to store blood serum and temperature sensitive medicines in field hospitals. The death toll of the war would have been greater than it already was were it not for him. A modified version of his air conditioning unit is still in use today. Jones’s feats in refrigeration are only the tip of his iceberg of innovations. Always retaining a mind for mechanics. By age nineteen, he had become shop foreman at the Cincinnati garage where he worked and built from scratch and drove several cars for racing exhibitions in the Great Lakes region. During World War I, as an army electrician, he rewired his forward operating base for electricity, telephone, and telegraph service.

After he left the army, he built a transmitter for a Minnesota radio station. He would make ends meet by driving doctors to house calls in the winter season, using a vehicle he built with skis and an old plane body. Jones invented a portable X-Ray machine for a doctor who complained of a patient’s inability to get to his office. In 1927, his first partnership with Joseph Numero was creating sound equipment for movie houses. Eventually, Jones converted silent movie projectors into talking projectors and even stabilized the picture quality. In 1939, he invented an automatic ticketing machine, who patent he eventually sold to RCA. For his efforts, Jones was the first African American to be elected into the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers. By the time of his death in 1961, Frederick McKinley Jones boasted over sixty patents and was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Technology, the first Black inventor to receive the honor.

12. Leah Chase (1923-2019)

Leah Chase, dubbed Queen of Creole Cuisine, used her culinary skills and charm to advance the Civil Rights Movement. She was born Leah Lange in 1923 to Catholic Creole parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of 14 children. Her early years were spent cultivating the family strawberry farm, which sparked her appreciation of food. After working as a server for a restaurant, in 1946 Lange married jazz musician Edgar “Dooky” Chase II, whose parents ran a po-boy stand in Treme, Louisiana. The couple eventually took over the stand with Leah becoming the head chef. Under her leadership, the stand grew into a sit-down restaurant with an elevated menu, serving French and Creole dishes that used to only be served in whites-only establishments.

The Dooky Chase Restaurant would become a meeting place during the Civil Rights Movement, as voter registration drives, political forums, and both Black and white organizers were welcomed there. These gatherings were prohibited by Louisiana law, but Chase care little, and the restaurant’s popularity prevented local officials from interfering operations without public backlash. Dooky Chase Restaurant hosted the likes fo Martin Luther King, Jr. and various Freedom Riders. Chase was also a fervent art collector and organized gallery openings of African American artists. She collected paintings and sculptures and would display them in the restaurant. Her love of art eventually garnered her membership on the boards of the Arts Council of New Orleans and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In 2005, The Dooky Chase Restaurant had to shut down because of flooding from Hurricane Katrina. Chase joined a coalition of women to lobby Congress for restoration funds after the administration’s abysmal handling of the disaster, and she was successful. Dooky Chase Restaurant re-opened in 2007. Leah Chase was such an influential figure that Disney used her as an inspiration for Tiana in 2009’s “The Princess and the Frog”, and she made a cameo appearance as herself in an episode of “NCIS: New Orleans”. Her restaurant was awarded “Best Fried Chicken in New Orleans” by NOLA.com in 2014, she was awarded the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, was awarded the National Council of Negro Women’s Outstanding Woman Award, was given the Weiss Award by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and awarded multiple NAACP awards.

Leah Chase was head chef of her restaurant until her passing at age 96 in 2019. She is survived by her four children, sixteen grandchildren, and twenty-two great-grandchildren. The Chase Family Foundation honors her legacy by advocating for youth education, social justice, and visual and culinary arts. The Dooky Chase Restaurant is still in operation today.

13. Lena Richard (1892-1950)

14 years before Julia Child became a household name, Lena Richard laughed in the face of the segregated South to become America’s first celebrity chefs and the first African American to host her own TV cooking show. Richard also ran a catering company, an international frozen food company, and a series of restaurants known so well for her gumbo recipe that Black and white patrons defied segregation laws to eat there. Richard also opened a cooking school in hopes that she could help other Black Americans make financial inroads into the food industry that they historically shaped for free.

Lena Richard self-published “New Orleans Cook Book” in 1939, the first Creole cookbook written by a Black author. The. book boasted dishes like crawdad bisque and a watermelon ice cream and sherbet that is shaped like an actual watermelon. The cookbook became so popular that Houghton Mifflin republished it internationally the next year. It is now available through Pelican via your local independent bookstore. In 1949, Richard starred in her own twice a week half-hour cooking show on New Orleans WDSU called “Lena Richard’s New Orleans Cook Book”. She show was a huge hit and ran until she passed away in 1950.

14. Beatrice Gray

You can thank a Black woman for the first co-op grocery store. In the 1960s, Nutritionist Beatrice Gay observed that Southeast Washington, D.C., lacked access to quality grocery stores, what we would call food deserts today. She organized buying clubs where community members could access affordable food. Later she opened the nation’s first cooperative grocery store inside of the Arthur Capper public housing project on Capitol Hill.

The co-op operated for over a decade, into the 1970s. Gray’s efforts were one way to fight the rise of food deserts in BIPOC neighborhoods. Residents also led protests, spoke to store owners about improving quality, circulated petitions, and researched store conditions in different neighborhoods, making the case for higher quality, fairer prices, and better treatment in neighborhoods that that had predominantly African American residents.

About Chris Thompson