Abby Fisher

(1832-Year of passing unknown)

Abby Fisher grew up in South Carolina and Alabama before moving to San Francisco to become a renowned chef and business woman behind her own pickles and preserves company called Mrs. Abby Fisher and Co. Her company produced pickles, jams, jellies, sauces, and relishes from her own recipes.

She was the second Black person to write a cookbook called “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking” in 1881. Up until then only White women, and some men, had written cookbooks, often using the knowledge of enslaved people without paying them for it. It’s also one of the first books written with the voice of a Black person shining through rather than the caricature of a Black person. 

On top of running a business to literally preserve African diaspora foodways and being a trailblazer in Black cookbooks and food culture, Fisher also had eleven children! At the end of her cookbook she offers a recipe that she fed her children to soothe and feed their tummies as infants. In Helen Zoe Veit’s “Food in the Civil War Era: The South” she points out how this recipe is exemplary considering many women in the 1900’s bore lots of children but rarely did those children survive, whereas all of Abby’s children grew up healthy.

Check out the Go Deeper section to see some of the more in depth articles out there celebrating this amazing Black woman. And also go support the Black folks who are continuing this legacy food preservation.

Illustration by Brittanie Mitchell for Seeds & Receipts.