Abby Fisher in San Francisco
Making a forgotten fortune on the Barbary Coast
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Episode 201: Abby Fisher in San Francisco
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(Below is not exactly a transcript of the episode, more like a script that I used. It works as an article, enjoy!)
The greater San Francisco Bay Area has been populated by humans for many thousands of years. By the 1600s the people living there were Ohlone, and the tribe living in what is now The City were Yelamu. Hundreds of Yelamu people resided at the northern tip of the peninsula, and it’s estimated that overall there were somewhere between 10,000 and 26,000 Ohlone people in the group before Europeans arrived and stayed.
This indigenous population was already nearly decimated by the 1840s, when fortune-seekers started showing up to San Francisco in literal droves. I feel like California, especially California cities, are not often considered a key part of the “Wild West,” but San Francisco, from that decade until the 1910s, could not have been a more stereotypical pioneer town. It was bigger than the others, but that just meant more opportunity to find your fortune and have a shoot-out and organize a posse and do horribly immoral things and be more open-minded about race and gender and class than most people in more eastwardly US cities.
So you can see why many people in the mid-1800s would be attracted to San Francisco, despite how dangerous it could be. This was a city nicknamed by its residents, with all the affection in the world, the Barbary Coast. After the area of North Africa known for its particularly vicious piracy - sometimes referred to as Barbarians. In other words, these were a people proud of how straight-up gnarly their lives were.
But, they needed food, and other items for survival, and, as the town got wealthier, comfort. And as we all know, the BEST way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell dry goods and groceries. And that’s what Abby Fisher did, setting up shop as a “pickle and preserves manufacturer” when she arrived to San Francisco in the 1870s.
Fisher was born in South Carolina in the early 1800s, some time around 1830. She was born a slave. Her mother was a slave, and her father was their captor. Fisher always worked in the kitchen, and at some point she was moved to Alabama, where she met her future husband, Alexander Fisher. They had 11 children. In 1877 the family moved to California.
Fisher and her husband set up a business called “Mrs Abby Fisher, Pickle Manufacturer.” They made “pickles, preserves, and sauces.” Fisher started entering her products in fairs - she won a “diploma,” the highest honor, at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair, and medaled at the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Fair multiple times.
Apparently winning these fairs was a MUCH bigger deal then than it is now, and ribbons meant an increase in sales. Fisher soon added a catering arm to her company, which, to my understanding, was where the real money was at.
In the 1880s San Francisco was still extremely rough around the edges. But, its transformation from a land of cowboys and miners to a playland for the robber barons of the Gilded Age had begun: a lot of people there were now stupid rich, and popular tastes were changing a little.
Catering was a fairly new industry in the 1880s. Both the concept of throwing a big party with a sit-down dinner if you didn’t have a full-time staff and the concept of off-site partying (that is, not at home) were pretty modern. The center of the catering industry was Philadelphia, and the leaders of the industry were African American.
As people moved around the country, the industry - like any industry - spread. Hosting a catered event was seen as pretty sophisticated, and white people were comfortable hiring Black people for this, I think because it was still a service gig, as expensive as it was. There’s record of some Black-owned catering companies in the late 1800s charging $50/plate, which is pretty expensive even in today’s dollars.
Of course, as Reconstruction failed due to the concerted efforts of racists, white people elbowed their way into the catering industry and became as white-dominated as anything else in the US.
Fortunately for Fisher, she had a lot of active support. In fact, some of her regular catering clients encouraged her to write a cookbook - she couldn’t write, so she dictated it to them, and they paid the printing costs.
As it happens, printing and publishing were growth industries in San Francisco at the time. Fisher’s book was printed by the Women’s Co-Operative Printing Union, which was founded in San Francisco in 1868 and was almost certainly the first woman-owned printing business in California. (Women have always been hired as manual typesetters, based on the idea that lady hands are small and nimble, but women owning the whole operation was of course rare.)
The book, called “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” was published in 1881. There are some old-timey errors - jambalaya is written “jumberlie,” for instance, and succotash is “circuit hash.” The thought is that the women doing the transcribing weren’t familiar with some food terms.
This book was very hard to find for about 100 years, but it was reprinted in 1995. It’s been added to the Michigan State University archive called Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project (which is a very cool resource). You can buy a copy most places online now - I did and I want to attempt all her pickle recipes. And the cakes. And the blueberry syrup that Fisher said cured colds. This cookbook isn’t just recipes - I mean, they never are, they’re always records of culture. And Fisher was living and pickling and cooking during an era where things were changing very quickly, both at large and for herself personally: she has recipes from when she was held as a slave and had to feed her children with very, very little alongside recipes for expensive feasts that she learned while a slave and repurposed for her clients in California. It’s 1800s American history in one little book.
Sources:
What Mrs Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking
history of information dot com
Repast: Quarterly Publication of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (PDF)
African American Women of the Old West
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Thanks for sharing the story of this very enterprising woman. I always love learning more about history as it relates to food. I’m going to check out her cookbook, too!