Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (45 page)

Every summer, Abby Fisher gathered just-ripe cling peaches and preserved
them in brandy. I don't know how long she let the brandy peaches rest on the
closet shelf before she spooned them over ice cream or served them with
feather cake, but it was probably at least a few months, until the time when she
was also baking apple pies, digging warmer clothes out of chests, and worrying
about the imminent frost. I'll never know what occupied her mind while she
put up those peaches, but because she included two recipes for brandy peaches
in What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, along with thirty
other recipes for pickles and preserves, I do know a good bit about how she
moved through the world and its seasons. The remainder of her recipes -all
equally accessible to intuitive modern-day cooks (you have to wing temperatures and cooking times) -are for roasted and broiled meats, breakfast breads,
cakes, croquettes, sweet and savory puddings and pies, salads, soups and gumbos, and home remedies. Cooking was the motion of Abby Fisher's life.

The handful of hard biographical facts we can know about Abby Fisher are
contained in an invaluable afterword written by culinary historian Karen
Hess, who culled bits of information from census reports, other historians,
and her own extensive knowledge of Southern cooking. Fisher was probably
born a slave in North Carolina, the offspring of a slave mother and a French
slave-owner father. She married a mulatto from Alabama, had eleven children, and, sometime in the 1870s, moved from Mobile to San Francisco, where
she opened a pickling and preserving business and later survived the earthquake of 19o6. Hers is the first known cookbook by an African American,
according to Hess, though subsequent findings suggest that another black
woman, Melinda Russell, published A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Recipes for the Kitchen, in 1866. The Women's Co-operative
Printing Office in San Francisco published the book in 1881, "about forty years
before women won the right to vote." As Abby Fisher could neither read nor
write, prominent friends in San Francisco transcribed the recipes for her.

These tidbits of information are fascinating, even sensational. They drew
me to the pocket-size book in the first place. But they are no competition for
the reason I now hold it dear: the recipes.

A cookbook like this one is an intimate memoir. A collection of a cook's
own recipes reveals her heart in the most visceral way, by laying down the particulars of how she feeds her family, herself, and, in some cases, her employers. The sure, feminine voice running throughout Abby Fisher's book divulges
more about her attitude during her routine activities than we can sometimes
learn about our own neighbors. Take her final recipe:

Pap for Infant Diet

Take one pint of flour, sift it and tie it up in a clean cloth securely tight, so
that no water can get into it; and put it in boiling water and let it boil steady
for two hours, then take it out of water, and when it gets cold take outside
crust from it. Whenever you are ready to nurse or feed the child, grate one
tablespoonful of the boiled flour, and stir it into half a pint of boiled milk
while the milk is still boiling; sweeten the same with white sugar to taste.
When the child has diarrhea, boil a two-inch stick of cinnamon in the pap.
I have given birth to eleven children and raised them all, and nursed them
with this diet. It is a Southern plantation preparation.

With few words, she shows us how she spent thousands of hours engaged in
the primordial task of nursing her children. Reading these practical instructions, I imagine her uncorking a jar of cinnamon sticks with a sick child in one
arm as the milk comes to a simmer nearby on the hearth; I imagine her in the
rocking chair, or asking a relative to comfort the child while she finalizes the
plantation's dinner preparations. But much more vital than my imaginings,
I have her words. By following them by taking less than ten minutes to make
pie pastry, say, rolling the dough "to the thickness of an egg-shell," I glimpse
the mind of this meticulous, observant woman and the pride she took in her
day-to-day occupations. No amount of historical trivia could replicate such
insights.

As I chop away at the 16o recipes, republished in paperback by Applewood
Books in 1995, I miss absolutely nothing. I enter Abby Fisher's world, and, just
as in any captivating story, there's enough here to keep me busy for days. This
is a world in which I "grate two or three sour pickles" for lamb croquettes and
then "chop the whole up very fine indeed"; the world in which peaches "remain under sugar for twenty-four hours," bleeding every drop of their reddish
pigment, before I add brandy, "cork the jars and put in closet." I lose myself in the chopping and in the waiting, the simple motions that Abby Fisher's legacy
stirred me to perform. These motions aren't terribly unique. Thousands of
people are performing similar tasks in their kitchens at this moment, which is
exactly what holds me so rapt. At the end of the day, it's the basic commonalities between humans that let us begin to understand one another at all. I like
to grate orange zest into sweet potato pie filling. So did Abby Fisher. I do it because someone once told me to, and because it made sense; she probably did
it because citrus and sweet potatoes came into season around the same time,
and because it made sense. Rather than accentuate our exotic differences,
cooking from this ex-slave's recipes almost feels like knowing her.

There's a jar of brandy peaches on a shelf in my kitchen now. When I glance
up at it, I don't think about all the unconfirmed facts and missing details, but
rather I wonder which recipe I'll try next and what it will disclose about the
seasons of Abby Fisher's life. I often recall one line in her "Preface and Apology": "Not being able to read or write myself, and my husband also being
without the advantages of an education upon whom would devolve the writing of the book at my dictation caused me to doubt whether I would be able
to present a work that would give perfect satisfaction." Abby Fisher's perfectly
satisfying book teaches that, just as authoring her recipe memoir had little to
do with the physical act of writing, so reading is just one step in the process of
learning another person's story.