A Cake for Juneteenth
A celebration of a woman's life
I baked a raspberry tea cake in honor of Juneteenth. It’s a simple cake, steeped in the holiday’s red color. A very special cake because the recipe comes from the first cookbook written by a Black woman. Malinda Russell published A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen in May 1866, the same year that celebrations of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation took hold in Texas. It was the last state to acknowledge slaves’ freedom and the first to claim to be the holiday’s birthplace.
A brief detour to share a bit of history about that birthplace claim:
Documents hold that the final reading of the Proclamation occurred at Pleasant Retreat, a once large plantation located in the general vicinity of Groesbeck, Texas. According to accounts from the Library of Congress and the Limestone County, Texas Historical Commission, on June 19, 1865, the plantation’s owner, Logan Stroud, stood on his porch and, before a gathering of his more than 100 slaves, read President Lincoln’s decree. Stroud’s slaves were the last to be set free.
Stroud is recorded as having been a good slave owner. He saw to it that his people were well fed, and the Stroud women tended to their health. Families were never separated and sold off, and some were given the privilege of defending the planation from Indian raids. While he read the Proclamation, Stroud became distraught because he realized that by freeing his slaves they wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves nor could he protect them against White mobs. He told them they could stay with him or, if they chose to leave, return to the plantation and continue to be clothed, fed, and housed in exchange for working his land.
Malinda Russell’s life proves how horribly wrong Mr. Stroud’s opinion was about the ingenuity and reliance of his former property.
Her cookbook begins with what she calls “A Short History of the Author.” Mrs. Russell was born lawfully free in Tennessee. At 19, she left home with the dream of shipping to Liberia and immediately suffered setbacks and cruelties that would plague the rest of her life: Robbed by a fellow traveler to Liberia which forced her to stop at Lynchburg, Virginia; widowed by her early 20s and a mother of a severely disabled son, she moved to Cold Springs, Tennessee and set up a boarding house and pastry shop; laid siege by Confederate guerrilla fighters who threatened her for being an independent successful Black woman and ransacked her considerable savings; and menaced by tattered Southern battalions as she fled North. A person of less intelligence, talent, and mettle would have surely succumbed somewhere along her path. Instead, she thrived wherever she was forced to stop and begin again, proud of her skills as a cook, laundress, proprietor of a boarding house, and, most especially, a baker.
By the time she reached her final destination in Michigan, Mrs. Russell was impoverished, in her 50s, and her son almost a man. Upon reaching sanctuary in the town of Paw Paw she once again took stock of her circumstances and decided the best path forward was to rely on what she knew best.
I have been advised to have my Receipts published, as they are valuable, and every family has use for them. Being compelled to leave the South on account of my Union principles, in the time of the Rebellion, and having been robbed of all my hard-earned wages which I had saved; and as I am now advanced in years, with no other means of support than my own labor; I have put out this book with the intention of benefiting the public as well as myself.
A single copy of Mrs. Russell’s cookbook was found at the bottom of a box of books in the collection of Helen Evans Brown. Upon its discovery, the fine culinary historian Janice Bluestein Longone purchased it, then began years of trying to continue Mrs. Russell’s story. She and her husband retraced Mrs. Russell’s steps and dug through birth, death, and census records. Their work led to the conclusion that, after May 1866, Mrs. Malinda Russell disappeared from history.
It’s a hard fact that on this day of celebrating slaves’ freedom, we know the life of a White slave owner and almost nothing of an extraordinary Black woman.
A Domestic Cook Book is available to be downloaded from the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library.
Raspberry Tea Cake
19th century version:
One cup white sugar, one pint sour cream, three tablespoons melted butter, three cups flour, one and half teaspoons soda, two do. cream tartar, grated nutmeg, mix into a batter; pour over sheet paper into dripping-pan; bake in a quick oven; when done, cut into squares, crush the berries, and sweeten to your taste. Cover the cake with berries, and stack the same as Gell Cake.
Modern version:
1 cup white sugar
1 pint sour cream
3 tablespoons melted butter
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
about 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
pinch grated nutmeg
1 pint raspberries, or more to taste
Line a square baking pan with enough parchment paper that it comes up over the sides. Set aside.
Preheat over to 425 degrees.
Mix all ingredients together and pour into prepared pan. Place in oven on middle shelf and cook for about 20-25 minutes.
Cool on wire rack. While the cake cools, wash raspberries in a wire strainer, place over a bowl, and then crush the fruit. Be sure to reserve the juice.
Pull the cake out by the parchment paper’s ends, peel off, and cut the cake into neat squares. To stack the squares the way Mrs. Russell’s instructed, arrange the squares into a pyramid on a pretty plate and then pour crushed raspberries over it, making sure the fruit covers each square’s side. Pour a little of the reserved juice.
The cake is best if you let it sit for an hour or two to allow the juice to seep through the cake.