Cookery and Copyright

Author(s): Carrie Helms Tippen, Heidi S. Hakimi-Hood and Amanda Milian

Source: Gastronomica , Winter 2019, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter 2019), pp. 1-9
Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26854635

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G A S T R O N O M I C T R A N S L A T I O N S | Carrie Helms Tippen, Heidi S. Hakimi-Hood, and
Amanda Milian

Cookery and Copyright: A History of

One Cookbook in Three Acts

Abstract: This article examines the history and movements of one John Murray, for the right to control the publication of her recipes.
collection of recipes in three “acts” or iterations in the nineteenth and Meanwhile, in the U.S., her book is continuously in print for decades,
twentieth centuries. Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell’s A New System of but Rundell receives no remuneration for it. Bivins, an African
Domestic Cookery is published in London in 1806, and almost imme- American merchant and principal of a training institute for black do-
diately, the book is pirated and printed in the United States. More mestic workers, takes the recipes attributed to Rundell from the pub-
than 100 years later, the same collection of recipes is reprinted by lic domain for The Southern Cookbook. The authors conclude that
S. Thomas Bivins under the title The Southern Cookbook. The this cookbook in three acts demonstrates how a history of the cook-
authors discuss the implications of the text’s movements through the book in general can challenge received understandings of authorship
lens of book history and copyright law. Rundell sues her publisher, and textual ownership.

THE COPYING OF A RECIPE text is not unusual by itself. (attorney Sarah F. Hawkins’s “Copyright and Recipes in
Recipes get copied and shared all the time. As the editors Plain English” [2011] is an entertaining example).
of The Recipe Reader Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster (2010) This article is a publication history of a set of recipe texts in
convey, “The root of the word recipe, the Latin word rec- three acts: from British cookery, to American kitchens, to
ipere, meaning both to give and to receive, reminds us that Southern catering. Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell’s A New
the instructions that appear to tie down the form of a dish System of Domestic Cookery is published in London in 1806, and
to be shared exist in a perpetual state of exchange” (6). almost immediately, the book is pirated and printed in the
Twenty-first-century cookbook writers have developed an United States. More than 100 years later, the same collection
informal system for giving credit for borrowed and shared of recipes is reprinted by S. Thomas Bivins under the title The
recipes through headnotes that describe the relationship be- Southern Cookbook. As a result, we approach the publication
tween the recipe contributor and the cookbook author, but history of Domestic Cookery chronologically. In the first section,
no formal system for citations has ever existed. Emmanuelle Heidi S. Hakimi-Hood treats matters concerning the book’s initial
Fouchard and Erik A. Von Hippel (2008) call this informal publication and Rundell’s copyright concerns in England.

WINTER 2019
agreement a “norms-based intellectual property system,” Amanda Milian follows with her discussion of international
and many other scholars of intellectual property law have copyright and the book’s first appearance in the U.S. Carrie
discussed the ways creators work with and around copyright Helms Tippen concludes with an exploration of Domestic
laws to match their own values. But as Jason Mazzone argues Cookery’s migration from nineteenth-century British cookery
1
in Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law book to a twentieth-century Southern publication, authored by G A STR ON OM ICA

(2011), these polite norms often extend protection beyond an African American educator. In the case of this cookbook in
what is required by law. While today the particular language three acts, the applicable copyright laws in the U.S. and U.K.
of recipe instructions and any accompanying headnotes are do not offer protection to recipe ideas or stop transatlantic piracy.
technically copyrightable as “literary expression,” the lists of As detailed below, Rundell and her publisher, John Murray, en-
ingredients and “ideas” of recipes have not been copyright- gaged in legal battles over the ownership of Domestic Cookery,
able or patentable. A quick online search makes clear that though even the courts could not rule with any certainty
the digital age of food blogs and searchable recipe databases whether the text belonged to the author or the publisher.
has created some confusion about what is illegal under intel- The first U.S. Federal Copyright Act of 1790 did not protect
lectual property law and what is simply unethical behavior recipes and did not provide any protection for “foreign works”

GASTRONOMICA : THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES , VOL . 19, NUMBER 4, PP. 1–9, ISSN 1529-3262, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2019 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED . PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR
PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS ’S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE, HTTPS ://WWW. UCPRESS .EDU /JOURNALS/REPRINTS-PERMISSIONS. DOI: HTTPS://DOI. ORG/10.1525/GFC.2019.19.4.1.

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 like English cookbooks. The 1807 Philadelphia edition of
Rundell’s cookbook was a pirated version of the London
edition, a practice that was common in nineteenth-century
America. Cheap reproductions of French and English cook-
books remained readily available during the first half of the
nineteenth century, and as a result, publishers did not see a
need to seek out risky new American cookbooks when they
were assured of profits from cheap, pirated European edi-
tions. American publishers regularly copied and adapted
pirated European books rather than composing new titles,
because there was a “culture of reprinting” in the nineteenth
century that encouraged the free circulation of materials over
concerns for originality and copyright (McGill 2003: 1). In
1806 and 1807, when Rundell’s cookbook was published
in London and Philadelphia (and Boston and New York
and Charleston, among others), comprehensive U.S. copy-
right and patent law as we know it today was still years
away, and international copyright law was several decades
further on.
At the time of the publication of The Southern Cookbook,
copyright law in the United States had recently been updated
in the 1909 Copyright Act. This act extended the duration
of copyright by allowing the author to renew the copyright
for a second term of twenty-eight years, totaling fifty-six
years of copyright protection (Section 23). Most importantly
for Bivins’s case, the new act did not extend to recipes
(Section 5), to works published before 1909 (Section 1), or “to
the works of a foreign author” (Section 7). Therefore, Bivins
broke no copyright laws in appropriating Rundell’s recipes,
even if copying the recipes verbatim. Under federal law,
Bivins is the copyright holder of The Southern Cookbook be-
cause of the copyright notice that follows the title page:
“Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1912, by
W I N TE R 2 0 1 9
S. THOMAS BIVINS, In the Office of the Librarian of
Congress at Washington.”
Verbatim copying of recipe texts was neither unlawful nor
unusual in U.S. publishing history; however, the reappearance
2 of this recipe collection fully a century after its first publication
in England by “a lady” now under the title The Southern
G A STR ON OM ICA
Cookbook, authored by the African American principal of a
school for black domestic workers, was, to say the least, unex-
pected. Some may react to the link between these two texts by
dismissing the text of the Bivins cookbook as meaningless.
After all, it is a copy. How can an “author” be said to make
meaning in a text that is not original? And yet, the acts of book-
making and book publishing have a rhetorical purpose that
brings a speaker with an agenda in contact with an audience
with a need. This article explores the journey of this particular
set of recipes in order to demonstrate how we may understand
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cookbooks to make meaning on their own and in conversation
with their source texts, even as they exist in a culture of copying.
Act One: Questioning Authorship in Rundell v.
Murray and Murray v. Rundell
When Rundell (1745–1828) submitted a manuscript to the
venerable, London-based John Murray Publishers, she took the
first steps toward becoming one of the nineteenth century’s
most successful British cookery-book writers. Rundell’s work,
A New System of Domestic Cookery; Formed upon Principles of
Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families, emerged
as a popular revenue generator for John Murray. Rundell joined
the ranks of some of the most widely recognized British writers,
for Murray also published Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and
Charles Darwin (Lee 2004). Since these three individuals wrote
novels, poetry, and nonfiction works, Murray clearly affiliated
itself with a diverse representation of authors, who, for cen-
turies, “inspired, influenced and entertained through every
possible genre” (National Library of Scotland [2006]).
While Austen, Byron, and Darwin ring familiar to general
audiences today, Rundell’s name is known to relatively few.
One reason why individuals might not be quick to recognize
Rundell is that her work was first published anonymously in
1806; her request for anonymity was likely due to social-class and
gender-based notions of respectability. To promote Rundell’s
critical significance, this section explores how she attempted
to receive acknowledgment as a copyright-bearing author in
England and became an astute businessperson whose cookery
book sparked significant transatlantic copyright and publishing
conversations.
After its initial 1806 publication in England, Domestic
Cookery went through sixty-five editions over a period of
thirty-five years (National Library of Scotland [2006]). A rapid
success, publishers printed 5,000 to 10,000 copies of Rundell’s
book yearly, and it was one of Murray’s “most valuable proper-
ties” (Lee 2004). What is more, in 1812, when “John Murray
bought the lease of his premises in Albemarle Street, the copy-
right of Domestic Cookery formed part of the surety” (Lee 2004).
The terms of this copyright, held by Murray in 1812, would soon
become a source of contention between the publisher and
Rundell.
During the first few years after publication, Murray and
Rundell’s relationship remained amicable. Perhaps, in acknowl-
edgment of the value of her work, “on 17 September 1808,
he made a payment of £150 to Mrs. Rundell” (Isaac 1998: 22).
Upon receiving this financial remuneration, Rundell asserted
in a letter to Murray, “I never had the smallest idea of any return
for what I considered a free gift to one whom I had long
regarded as my friend” (Lee 2004). Although Rundell’s humility
seems an apparent contradiction to her legal actions later, such
sentiments were conventional to the time. In addition to this
payment, Murray also sent Rundell nonmonetary gifts in the
form of books.
The year 1819 marks a turning point in Domestic Cookery’s
publication history. With the original copyright expiring after
its term of fourteen years, Rundell moved to take back her
copyright, an action that would result in “Murray’s longest,
most expensive war over literary property” (Dyer 2013: 121).
Shortly afterward, Murray and Rundell filed legal injunctions
against one another since both laid claim to the book, and
Murray “argued that he had been given permission to publish
the work, with no restrictions” (122). Rundell hoped to publish
an edition with Longmans and “commenced an action at law
against Murray” (122).
While the contemporary reader might determine that an
author’s right to compensation is well earned, Rundell’s rela-
tionship to her own nineteenth-century materials was more
complicated. In “Murray against Rundell, for Copyright of
Cookery Book,” which appeared under the “Prosecutions and
Miscellaneous Cases” section of the Edinburgh Annual
Register (January 1821), the writer suggests that Rundell offered
her work to Murray because she knew that “Upon the shelves
of Mr. Murray it would become the companion of the works
of the most celebrated poets, historians, and philosophers … .
This to an author, and a female author, actuated by the laud-
able vanity of seeing her work so ushered forth to general atten-
tion was sufficient reward” (83). On the one hand, this writer’s
claims reflect a nineteenth-century cultural understanding of
gender and authorship that may not reflect Rundell’s own
ambitions or view of her own authorship. On the other hand,
Murray, too, had his own intentions and authorial claims.
However, Murray claimed that he made substantial contri-
butions to Domestic Cookery by hiring an editor to revise
Rundell’s “receipts,” supplying a title page, and advising
Rundell to create multiple additions including a carving essay.
Murray hired persons to craft engravings and a table of con-
tents and contributed his own recipes for a section titled
“Bills of Fare for Family Dinners” (“Murray against Rundell”
1821: 84). When Murray thought of publishing a new run of
the book in 1807, he added more of his own thoughts to the
work. Rundell was aware of these additions and refers to them
in a letter written to Murray on March 28, 1807: “You mention
that the book is too large, but the person who recommended
entering Poultry, plates, bills of fare, &c, led us into that error,
and I am of opinion that the animals [two plates of animals
and two pages of letter press with the various ‘cuts’ indicated],
carving and dinner sets out may add to the usefulness of the
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work” (Isaac 1998: 19–20). At the time of Murray’s injunction
against Rundell, Murray asserted that the book was popular,
in part, because of his contributions; he claimed that one-
fourth of the book was a product of his own endeavors
(“Murray against Rundell” 1821: 84).
When Murray learned of Rundell’s plan to pursue another
publisher, Murray received an injunction from the Lord
Chancellor in December 1819, “to prevent Mrs. Rundell from
publishing the book with any of his additions and embellish-
ments” (Morgan 2009: xvi). Soon after, Rundell also filed for
an injunction to “restrain the defendant from publishing the
work” (Jacob 1821: 314). In November 1821, the Lord Chancellor
dismissed the injunction against Murray, “but gave right to nei-
ther party, declaring that a court of law and not a court of
equity must decide between them” (Lee 2004). To complicate
matters, as the Edinburgh Annual Register (January 1821) noted,
“Mrs. Rundell had given Mr. Murray the copyright for the first
fourteen years only, as a remuneration for the expense which he
incurred in publishing the book; it never was her intention to
abandon all future claim upon the work. It was admitted that
Mrs. Rundell had the legal title” (“Murray against Rundell”
1821: 85–86). Murray and Rundell eventually agreed to a settle-
ment. In 1823, Rundell “sold all her rights to him for £2,100”
(Dyer 2013: 122).
Given that Domestic Cookery has passed through so many
hands, editions, and time periods, as a representative of the
cookery-book genre, Rundell’s work might well display certain
literary implications. However, it seems clear that Domestic
Cookery was a collaborative effort of author and publisher.
Both Murray and Rundell believed they contributed intellec-
tual property to the text, but unlike a Jane Austen novel or a
collection of Byron’s poetry, it is less obvious under the law
who should receive cash and credit for Domestic Cookery.
WINTER 2019
Rundell’s assertiveness in taking control of Domestic Cookery
and filing an injunction seeking damages so that she might
publish it in a manner that she deemed fit sharpens Rundell’s
professional credentials as a businesswoman. However, the
Lord Chancellor who presided over Rundell’s initial injunction
3
G A STR ON OM ICA
against Murray found the relationship between cookery books
and copyright challenging, and Jacob (1828: 315) writes that the
Lord Chancellor remarked,
We are not apprised of the circumstances under which this manuscript
was given. If the Plaintiff had composed these receipts, or embodied
and arranged them in a book, she would have a copyright in it, but if
she had only collected them, and handed them over to Mr. Murray,
I do not apprehend that they would be the subject of copyright.
The court grappled with trying to discern who was the right-
ful owner of Domestic Cookery because it lacked proof that
 Rundell actually wrote each recipe herself. Before one is too
quick to decide about Rundell’s claim to her book, the sec-
ond clause of this statement suggests that arranging recipes
is an equivalent act of composition. Recipes by themselves
are not necessarily granted copyright; however, the way a rec-
ipe book is arranged can be given copyright. As Isaac (1998)
reports, Rundell criticized drafts of Domestic Cookery’s sec-
ond edition because she did not like the arrangement of the
text and “suggested a better arrangement for bringing recipes
together” (21). Murray, as one who arranged recipe texts in
Domestic Cookery, contributed copyrightable material to the
book, too. Rundell was undoubtedly a woman whose experi-
ences with culinary writing and the publishing trade allow for
scholars of food, history, and literature to view her impact on
nineteenth-century transatlantic social exchange, considering
that she emerged as a paid compiler or editor, if not a
copyright-bearing author.
Act Two: Republishing Rundell’s Domestic
Cookery in America
American publishers started printing Rundell’s A New System
of Domestic Cookery in 1807, just one year after its first ap-
pearance in England. Rundell’s cookbook helped fill a void
in domestic cooking literature in America, and its vast repub-
lication there reflected the era’s struggle with international
copyright protection and intellectual property. Cookbooks
as a genre added another element to this struggle because
they seemed to dwell outside of the rules governing other
printed materials related to ownership, originality, and gen-
der norms. Using the 1807 Philadelphia edition of Rundell’s
cookbook as a case study, this section demonstrates the lack
of protection for early-nineteenth-century female authors in
W I N TE R 2 0 1 9
the Western world and the question of originality by histori-
cizing the concepts of ownership and authorship.
The publication of cookbooks in colonial America began
as a specialty item with The Compleat Housewife; or,
4 Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, in 1742. Printed in
Williamsburg by William Parks, this cookbook drew heavily
G A STR ON OM ICA
from the fifth edition of a London cookbook by Eliza Smith
(Hess 1997: vi). The first “American” cookbook did not appear
until 1796 with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, but
the production of American cookbooks did not substantially
expand until roughly a quarter century later with Mary
Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife in 1824.
While the demand for domestic cookbooks may have been
growing during this period, the lack of substantial financial gain
left potential cookbook authors at the mercy of their publishers.
Very few authors or publishers became wealthy through their
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publications in the early American republic. In part, this
stemmed from the financial hazards publishers faced in pro-
ducing new works, which stood the risk of costing more than
they earned in profits. For women writers, there were addi-
tional considerations. Writing for publication any written
treatise, even something like a cookbook that fit comfortably
within the parameters of her domesticity, remained taboo for
women writers, and few, if any, women became publishers
themselves.
The lack of strong international copyright protection be-
tween the United States and Great Britain, along with the de-
cided economic advantage for American publishers to
reproduce British books without needing to pay royalties,
contributed to the drought in American-authored cookbooks.
Publishers knew that reprinted foreign texts held the greatest
possibility for circulation and profit (McGill 2003: 28).
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the publisher
remained more powerful than the author did in terms of
rights and protection under the law. According to Meredith
McGill, it was publishers, not authors, who “promote[d]
democratic principles” through their recirculation of popular
foreign works (23). By applying nineteenth-century republi-
can values to publishing, they used reprinting as a “sophisti-
cated instrument” to spread democratic ideals in the form
of cheap, accessible print (20, 23).
The Federal Copyright Act of 1790 promoted this “cul-
ture of reprinting.” It allowed a citizen of the United
States the right to file with the clerk’s office “any such map,
chart, book or books” of their creation for a copyright lasting
fourteen years, the same as in Great Britain. In that period,
only the owner of the copyright (which was usually the pub-
lisher) could “print, reprint, publish or vend” the document
in question. The protections for American authors were not
always a guarantee against piracy. Publishers still repro-
duced Simmons’s work in clear violation of her copyright,
and in many cases, pirated her work in other states without
even crediting the author (Hess 1984: xix). Both Sections 5
and 6 of the 1790 Copyright Act clearly delineate between
the rights of American citizens and foreigners. Congress de-
clared, “Nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to pro-
hibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing
within the United States, of any…books, written, printed, or
published by any person not a citizen of the United States.”
The addition of this clause “bestows upon publishers an extraor-
dinary license; that of the unrestricted republication of foreign
texts” (Copyright Act 1790; McGill 2003: 81). All of these factors
made the authoring and publishing of original cookbooks risky
and likely unprofitable in the early nineteenth century com-
pared to reprinting.
 Rundell’s book was first published in the United States dur-
ing this nascent period in American printing. It became rela-
tively popular, reaching at least thirty-seven editions (Hess
1984: xx). The first American versions of A New System of
Domestic Cookery were published in 1807 in Philadelphia by
Benjamin C. Buzby and in Boston by William Andrews.
The many reproductions of Rundell’s cookbook from 1807
to 1844 suggest its popularity and profitability. It went into a
second edition the same year as the first, 1807, and quickly
became available by many other booksellers in New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston, but also in smaller nearby cities.
This popular book also made its way south, achieving sales
through Warner & Hanna, in Baltimore, Maryland, and as far
south as Charleston, South Carolina, by E. Morford. In some
cases, publishers listed multiple sellers in the front of the book
to help promote their extensive networks. Although Rundell’s
cookbook was popular in the United States, the contents of the
cookbook remained relatively unchanged from the original
London version. The American reprints contained the same
basic recipe texts as the original British edition. If the percep-
tion of published recipes was that they were common knowl-
edge, or at least common enough to be familiar to the
reader, then they were eminently available for duplication
without fear of copyright infringement.
It is clear that the widespread reproduction of Rundell’s
book was made possible by a growing market of readers and
buyers, but Rundell herself—and even Murray, the legal copy-
right holder—received no benefits, nor did they seek any
remunerations from American publishers. The popularity of
Rundell’s book in America, in part, was the result of the ab-
sence of international copyright agreements. Congress did not
pass additional copyright protection until 1831 (Tebbel 1972:
558; McGill 2003: 10). Achieving acceptance of international
copyright law in the United States proved difficult. Historian
John Tebbel (1972: 561) contended, “the publishing business,
in general, was actually opposed to international copyright,
and its opposition was all an apathetic Congress needed to de-
lay and postpone it until the end of the century.” Tebbel cites
Wallace Bishop’s analysis of why America lagged behind other
countries in pursuing international copyright law. Bishop
blamed anti-intellectualism and a lack of interest in the wel-
fare of authors, but importantly, Bishop also noted how “pub-
lishers who were making a great deal of money from piracy
were not eager to have laws restricting it.” American consum-
ers likewise “were getting a good thing from the British”
through publication of books, including cookbooks, that
could be had cheaply (559). The republication of Rundell’s
book in America broke no copyright laws, and Americans at
large had no real opposition to piracy in general, and to piracy
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of cookbooks in particular. The republication of works by
British authors best suited the American public’s need for
cooking manuals and the publishers’ need for profit in the
early nineteenth century.
Act Three: Transforming Domestic Cookery into
The Southern Cookbook
The popularity of Rundell’s cookbook in England and North
America had waned by the mid-nineteenth century. This
section centers on the revival of the text of Rundell’s recipes
in an unlikely place: S. Thomas Bivins’s 1912 The Southern
Cookbook: A Manual of Cooking and List of Menus Including
Recipes Used by Noted Colored Cooks and Prominent Caterers.
The book contains nearly 700 recipes, of which whole sections
of text are copied exactly from A New System of Domestic
Cookery. Other sections appear to be copied with the recipes
in reverse order, but the text of the recipes is verbatim. For
example, the majority of the fifty recipes in the “fish” section
of Bivins’s book also appear in the 1814 London edition of
Rundell’s book, and the opening text of that section,
“Observations on Dressing Fish,” is unchanged from the
Rundell text. Except for the preface and introduction, all of
the long passages of text between chapters (the only parts of
any cookbook to unquestionably meet the definition of
“significant literary expression”) also appear in Domestic
Cookery, including the “Directions to Servants” and many
instructions for cleaning and removing stains (Bivins 1912:
132–37).
Little information has been formally published on Bivins
or his book, except to note that Bivins is perhaps one of the
earliest African American authors of a cookbook specifically
marketed to an audience of black cooks. On the title page of
WINTER 2019
The Southern Cookbook, Bivins is listed as “Principal of
Chester Domestic Training Institute, Chester, PA.” According
to The Southern Workman (February 1913: 126), the institute
offered training in “cooking, waiting, and housekeeping,” and
was dedicated to the mission “to raise the domestic vocations 5
to the highest plane.” The Chester Institute was likely one of
G A STR ON OM ICA
many short-lived normal schools for African Americans at the
turn of the century; however, no archive for this institute could
be identified.
Much more has been written about the publisher of The
Southern Cookbook: the Press of the Hampton Institute, of
Hampton, Virginia. The Hampton Institute was founded in
1868 by leaders of the American Missionary Association (AMA)
as a school for African Americans. From 1878 to 1923, Hampton
was also instrumental in controversial Native American edu-
cation (Denton 1993: 67–68). Perhaps Hampton’s best-known
 graduate is Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee
Institute, which was also sponsored by the AMA (69). Bivins
attended the Hampton Institute as a student in 1875. In a note
about “Graduates and Ex-Students” in Hampton’s monthly pub-
lication, The Southern Workman (February 1913), Bivins is identi-
fied as the principal of Chester and author of The Southern
Cookbook. The announcement condenses the language of the
“Preface” to the Cookbook without adding much new informa-
tion. This little bit of information is repeated often whenever
Bivins’s book is referenced, but little else is reported about him
or his school.
This is significant because Bivins’s book is referenced fre-
quently in studies of Southern food and cooking as one of the
first cookbooks published by a named African American author.
In the extensive bibliography of John Egerton’s Southern Food:
At Home, on the Road, and in History, Egerton reports that
Bivins “may have been [among] the first black authors to write
and publish volumes on food” (1987: 376). Later research has
recovered earlier black-authored texts. In The Jemima Code,
Toni Tipton-Martin (2015: 10) identifies the earliest known text
“of any kind” published by an African American as The House
Servant’s Directory by Robert Roberts in 1827. Abby Fisher’s
What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking from
1881 is perhaps the best known of the early black cookbooks,
reissued in 1995 with a scholarly introduction by culinary his-
torian Karen Hess. The Southern Cookbook was released one
year after Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus, repub-
lished in 2004 with the subtitle “The First Cookbook by an
African American Chef.” The introduction and preface of
The Southern Cookbook do not explicitly identify either
Bivins or the Chester students as people of color, but the sub-
title of the cookbook (A Manual of Cooking and List of
Menus Including Recipes Used by Noted Colored Cooks and
W I N TE R 2 0 1 9
Prominent Caterers), an appeal to the value of domestic ser-
vice in the preface, and the connection to the Hampton
Institute all indicate that the book is authored by and for pro-
fessional black cooks. Although the fact that Bivins’s book
6 exists is clearly important to Southern food historians, these
estimations of The Southern Cookbook’s significance do not
G A STR ON OM ICA
take into account—or appear to be aware of—the fact that
large portions of the text also appear in Rundell’s A New
System of Domestic Cookery. I do not intend to argue that the
importance of Bivins as an author or his book as a landmark
publication is diminished by this fact; rather, I argue that the
book may be more important because of its connection to
other texts as it can reveal how the composition practices of
cookbook-making present challenges to copyright law and
publication history, and that those exceptions may have been
exploited by marginalized authors to their own benefit.
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The 1900 Philadelphia census lists one S. Thomas Bivins,
born February 1858 in Virginia, as the husband of May (or
Mary) Bivins and the father of two sons. For over twenty years
starting in 1884, Bivins is consistently listed in city directories as
an upholsterer with a rotating list of business partners. It appears
from the Death Certificates Index that Bivins’s wife Mary died in
1911, and in 1912, Bivins is listed in the Chester, Pennsylvania, city
directory as providing “Machine Whitewashing” services at the
address of 350 Fulton Street. Chester is approximately twenty
miles southwest of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. The
year 1912 is the same year that The Southern Cookbook is pub-
lished and Bivins is the principal of the Chester Domestic
Training Institute. The data available in the census and city
directories suggests that the S. Thomas Bivins who penned
The Southern Cookbook was not a professional cook or writer,
as some scholars have claimed, but an upholsterer and furniture
dealer, a business professional and craftsperson from the mer-
chant class of African Americans in Philadelphia.
It makes some sense that a successful black tradesman
with twenty years of experience in business who was a former
student of Hampton would be appointed to be the principal
of a domestic training institute for African Americans. But
it is not readily apparent why a principal with a background
in upholstery, furniture making, and “machine whitewash-
ing” would author a cookbook. One answer could be found
in an understanding of Hampton Institute’s approach to
teaching cooking and preparing students for domestic service
work. Andrew Warnes (2004: 7) is among many who have de-
scribed an ideological divide between Booker T. Washington
(a Hampton graduate) and W. E. B. DuBois. Both agreed
that cooking was a practical/functional skill, an “inartistic
practice.” However, Warnes explains that Washington en-
couraged cooking instruction over less practical instruction
like writing as a method for advancement through steady em-
ployment. DuBois preferred teaching writing, which in his
opinion “held untold, latent value” for advancement through
intellectual pursuits. If Washington’s position on cooking
instruction represents the philosophy of Hampton, it can be
concluded that Hampton, and by extension Chester, would
present cooking as a skill that could lead to economic
empowerment. A reliable textbook would be needed to teach
students to cook professionally in Southern kitchens. It seems
clear that Bivins would not likely have been capable of gen-
erating such a textbook out of “original” recipe text as he was
not a professional cook. If Warnes is correct in his assessment
of Hampton curriculum and philosophy, then Bivins would
not have been trained in a tradition that valued composition
as an artistic practice, but with a view of writing as a practical
skill to meet another need. Finally, an “original” or “creative”
cookbook would not serve the purpose of the students at
Chester, who needed to demonstrate proficiency in an au-
thoritative culinary canon. Copying the contents of that text-
book from an established cookbook makes sense, then, as
both an extension of a definition of composition as a practical
pursuit and a strategic answer to the unique needs of Bivins’s
students.
Consequently, The Southern Cookbook bears evidence of
this emphasis on cooking as empowering work. The preface
states that this book is to be “a manual which the family and
hotel proprietors can take in hand with a certainty of finding
directions and assistance in most of the doubts and perplexities
which beset their daily life” (Bivins 1912: 3). As a reference
guide and textbook, The Southern Cookbook would not only
provide time-tested information but also a method for ad-
vancement. It was “a book which, if studied and followed, will
render [the student] sagacious, able, well informed, ready,
cheerful and accomplished in whatever makes the table the
dearest comfort and the fountain of purest delight” (3).
Bivins makes clear that he does not see the domestic servant
as an inferior or oppressed laborer. To the contrary, Bivins
writes in the introduction: “It is said that the mother who rocks
the cradle controls the nation, but the domestic who faithfully
and intelligently serves her who rocks the cradle is, in fact, the
real ruler” (5). The domestic servant is in a privileged position
to direct the nation from the kitchen. Moreover, Bivins argues
that domestic service was an opportunity for creative expres-
sion. Bivins suggests that good domestics not only “have a thor-
ough knowledge of the family” and their “peculiar tastes,” but
they also make themselves “indispensable” to their employers
by “creating new dishes” and “developing the art of cooking”
(5). The implication is that students could take these recipes
and innovate with them, just as Bivins took them from the
public domain for his own purposes.
The introduction to The Southern Cookbook explicitly val-
ues creativity and originality; however, Bivins’s own claims of
originality are carefully equivocated. The subtitle of the work
makes clear that the recipes collected in this book are “Used
by Noted Colored Cooks and Prominent Caterers” (emphasis
mine). In the introduction, Bivins describes the process of
writing this cookbook as “construction,” suggesting that he
was assembling a book rather than creating one; he writes
that he is “supplying this manual for knowledge” and “pre-
senting” it to the public, words that suggest Bivins is a kind
of conductor rather than author. Bivins suggests that these
recipes have been collected after considerable research:
“more than twenty years of experience and investigation”
(4). Some scholars have read this as evidence that Bivins was
a professional cook, but the evidence I have located does not
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support this conclusion. Except for this (perhaps disingenu-
ous) claim to “more than twenty years of experience,”
Bivins makes no other direct claims to professional cooking.
He refers to himself only as the author of the book and com-
piler of the recipes. By calling himself “writer” and “author,”
Bivins does claim ownership of the whole text under copy-
right law, but the terms “writing” and “authoring” describe
his process of selecting, compiling, and editing recipes.
This brief introduction offers considerable insight into the
particular definitions and expectations of authorship that
Bivins is working within in 1912. Although Bivins likely com-
posed only a few paragraphs of text, he views this collabora-
tive act of book-making as an acceptable form of authorship
which seems quite out of step with the norms of book-making
a century later.
Bivins’s calculated equivocation suggests some concern
over making broad claims of originality; however, in the
context of the employment of Bivins’s book as a manual,
originality might not have been valued as highly as proven
effectiveness. Twenty-first-century readers may react nega-
tively to Bivins’s appropriation of recipes, because while
today’s cookbook writers operate under very similar copy-
right laws with no formal system for acknowledging when
a recipe idea or text is being “copied” or adapted in a new
work, authors do seem to have agreed informally upon the
generic convention of the recipe headnote as an acceptable
method for giving credit to recipe contributors (see hand-
books for food writers by Ostmann and Baker 2001; Jacob
2010). Even though cookbooks earlier than Bivins’s do cite
sources in notes and titles, Bivins was operating under no
such industry agreement or generic convention. No law or
other governing body mandated that Bivins should create
original recipes, innovate with established recipes, or cite
WINTER 2019
the source of previously published recipes.
At the time of the publication of The Southern Cookbook,
the 1909 Copyright Act regarded Bivins’s cookbook as pro-
tected under Section 6, which states that “compilations” of
“works in the public domain… shall be regarded as new 7
works subject to copyright under the provisions of this act.”
G A STR ON OM ICA
By this law, Bivins is the copyright holder of The Southern
Cookbook. However, the second clause of Section 6 limits
Bivins’s copyright. He is, by law, the owner of the compila-
tion called The Southern Cookbook, but he does not hold the
exclusive rights to the individual contents of that compila-
tion. In other words, Rundell’s recipes were in the public do-
main before Bivins collected them into The Southern
Cookbook, and by law they remained in the public domain.
The recipes could be re-collected and re-compiled by an-
other cookbook writer without copyright infringement.
 It would be mere conjecture to attempt to describe Bivins’s
intentions or decision-making processes without more informa-
tion, but it seems safe to say that the students of the Chester
Domestic Training Institute needed a cookbook with recipes
to please their future white employers and Bivins gave them
one. As a business venture, this one was low risk, with poten-
tially high returns on a strategically low investment. There is
something alluringly revolutionary about a black author app-
ropriating the work of an English lady to help other black do-
mestic workers “rule” the nation from white kitchens, when so
often the work of people of color has been appropriated by
white authors for their own personal gain (see Rebecca
Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens, 2013). Bivins
argued that this cookbook would give its readers power.
Perhaps that power extended from the colonization of English
and white American public resources rather than the further
exploitation of black arts for white employers.
Curtain Call: Reading Cookbooks in a Culture
of Copying
Readers who approach any cookbook text as critics of lan-
guage and literature must do so with the understanding of
cookbook composition practices in context. In The Southern
Cookbook, the specific language of the recipe text is not
“original” with Bivins. When Toni Tipton-Martin (2015: 32)
asks readers in The Jemima Code to “listen to the voice of
the cooking-school teacher, writing in a composed, compas-
sionate, and constructive manner” as she quotes the text of
three recipes, it is unclear how we might think of Bivins
as “speaking” in the text of the recipes. Is this the voice of
Rundell? One of Rundell’s many editors in London or
Philadelphia? Or do the recipe texts represent Bivins’s voice
W I N TE R 2 0 1 9
because he chose them and placed them behind his name?
Similarly, John Egerton uses a passage from The Southern
Cookbook in his Southern Food in order to illustrate essential
Southern characteristics. The passage, titled “Respecting
8 the Poor” (quoted in Egerton 1987: 277, in Bivins 1912: 129)
is verbatim from Rundell. Egerton is using the selection as
G A STR ON OM ICA
evidence of Southern hospitality and “making do.” Can
Egerton draw these connections between the content of
“Respecting the Poor” and the character of the South if
Bivins is pulling his text from an English cookbook? Did
Bivins include this section from Rundell because it reso-
nated with his vision of the South? It is only apparent that
Bivins thought the passage would be useful to his students.
Sharing text and sharing authorship makes the reading of
any version of this recipe collection more complicated but
no less valuable.
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It is clear from this investigation that cookbooks, even when
they appear under the name of a single author, are collaborative
projects. Copyright law tends to reward the single author as a
point of origin for all parts of the text. In Rundell’s case, the
court distinguished clearly between the rights Rundell would
have if she “had composed [the text of] these receipts” and the
rights she would have if “she had only collected them” (empha-
sis added). The implication is that collection is an inferior sort
of book-making that carries fewer rights, and that the originality
of composition is the baseline of copyright. Similarly, in a 1903
decision, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
(quoted in Samuels 2002: 128) defined originality as the unique
thumbprint of a single author: originality is “the personal reac-
tion of an individual upon nature. Personality always contains
something unique. It expresses its singularity even in handwrit-
ing, and a very modest grade of art has in it something irreduc-
ible, which is one man’s alone. That something he may
copyright.” The law protects creative works which are imbued
with the author’s identity and personality and which could only
be created by that person in their unique experiences and con-
texts. Some cookbooks and recipe texts meet this level of origi-
nality, but a great many, like The Southern Cookbook, get
their value from being the opposite of single-authored and orig-
inal: collaborative and time-tested.
Through Domestic Cookery, Rundell experienced firsthand
the challenges associated with trying to claim her rights as the
creator of a collection of works that the court declared could not
be attributed to her alone. Her work began anonymously, was
republished across time and place, and was adopted by other
culinary creators as the work of their own hands. Rundell even-
tually received some remuneration from the publisher through
legal negotiations. Rather than negotiating with the law for
rights as did Rundell, Bivins actually exploits the exceptions in
copyright law to his benefit. Without breaking any laws,
Bivins appropriates works of the public domain to generate a
text that would be his sole property under law. As one of the ear-
liest African American cookbook authors, Bivins is significant as
an innovator in authorship and publishing, even if he is not a
culinary innovator. Bivins takes ownership of intellectual prop-
erty rights available to him under law in a historical moment
where his rights to own physical property would have been
limited.
We have used the verbs “copy” and “appropriate” and “pi-
rate” throughout this article to describe the movement of
Rundell’s text through American publishers to Bivins. The
language of the 1909 Act describes this process more accu-
rately; The Southern Cookbook is a compilation, and Bivins
is a compiler, collector, curator, and editor. And in fact,
Rundell’s 1806 book is likely a compilation, too, of recipe
ideas (if not texts) that existed in the public domain collected,
curated, compiled, and edited by Rundell and a team of
publishers (if Murray is to be believed). The compilation of
The Southern Cookbook from material in the public domain
does not nullify its value, nor would Domestic Cookery be less
important in cookbook history if Rundell collected recipe
texts and ideas from her network of friends. However, under-
standing the cookbook genre as a collaborative enterprise is
a step in recognizing the exceptional nature of cookbook-
making in literary arts. Where plagiarism on this scale might
exclude a novel from publication or from any further atten-
tion from literary scholars, at no time in its history did the
spectre of “plagiarism” prevent Rundell’s compilation from
publication or republication. Neither should copying pre-
vent literary scholars from paying attention to the meaning-
making possibilities of a copied text or to the contexts of
the copying.
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