The Virginia House-wife: 200th Anniversary Edition

This is a facsimile edition of an 1824 work which became one of the most influential American cookbooks of the nineteenth century. It includes two very useful additions which place it in historical context.

Mary Randolph (1762-1828) was a member of the intricately connected Randolph family of Virginia. She was a cousin of George Custis, Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage; her brother married Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha. A reversal of family fortunes meant that she had to turn from being an acclaimed social and political hostess to running a boarding house and to writing this book.

Randolph offers well over 200 recipes, written in the conversational style of the day, often without precise measurements, which reflect both the English heritage of so many Virginia families but also American ingredients and techniques: e.g., ochre (okra) soup, barbecued pork, corn meal pudding. 

An introduction and supplemental commentaries by culinary historian Karen Hess (1918-2007) tell us much about the world in which Mary Randolph’s book first appeared, particularly the cookbooks commonly available at the time, and The Virginia House-wife’s long influence on books which followed it. Hess was a rigorous and pioneering scholar determined to correct common misconceptions about historical American cooking; her use of the phrase “arrant nonsense” in her first paragraph is characteristic.

This new edition adds a foreword by podcaster and documentarian Debra Freeman which addresses a significant issue which Hess did not cover: the contribution of enslaved cooks and free blacks to American and particularly Southern cooking. This is reflected not only in ingredients such as okra, but also in the connections to Thomas Jefferson’s household and the recipes and techniques Jefferson’s enslaved cook James Hemmings brought back from France following his time there while Jefferson was the US ambassador in Paris.

A significant book enriched by thoughtful perspectives.

Hardcover.