Does the fact that filé appears in a few non-Louisiana cookbooks mean that people outside Louisiana were actually starting to thicken gumbo with filé? What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881), the second oldest known cookbook to have been written by an African-American, can help us answer that.
Abby Fisher was born around 1832 in South Carolina, apparently the daughter of a French-born slaveowner and a Carolina-born slave. She wound up in Alabama sometime before the Civil War, and from at least 1869 to 1876 she lived in Mobile with her husband, Alexander C. Fisher, an Alabama-born minister. In the late 1870s the Fishers moved westward to San Francisco, where Abby Fisher made a living as a cook and operated a pickle and preserves business with her husband.
Abby Fisher dictated her book to a committee of nine residents of San Francisco (her “lady friends and patrons”) just a few years after she arrived on the West Coast.
