Born into Slavery, Rufus Estes Became One of the First Black Cookbook Authors and Served Presidents

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Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus is a modest title for a cookbook, considering the “good things to eat” includes dishes served to presidents, a princess, business tycoons, and world-famous musicians. But even if Rufus Estes was modest about his book – which “he frankly admits is not without its faults” – it was a milestone: one of the first cookbooks published by a Black author, who had been born into slavery and become an esteemed cook on opulent Pullman rail cars.

While Estes may have been humble regarding his writing, he knew the worth of his cooking. “Some of the most prominent people in the world traveled in the car assigned to me,” he writes before listing a few: Presidents Grover Cleveland and William Henry Harrison, Princess Eulalia of Spain, the famous pianist and later Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

Good Things to Eat offers a glimpse into how the upper class ate around the turn of the twentieth century. Turkey stuffed with an exorbitantly expensive amount of truffles served with gravies or sauces; labor-intensive, eye-catching jellies of cucumbers, lemon, or chicken; “salads” made to look like a flower or a bird’s egg in a nest; candied flowers to decorate cakes; ice creams in an age before widespread refrigeration. American foodways such as native wild rice, “an old Indian dish,” appear. Dishes from around the globe are present, albeit in misunderstood ways: “Japanese or Chinese rice” is flavored with bay leaf, tomato juice, parsley, paprika, and cheese; the noodles in “Spaghetti a l’Italienne” are cooked to such softness that they absorb the juice from canned tomatoes to make a “tomato sauce.” Lunch was the easiest meal to prepare, as it consisted of transformations of meat and vegetables from dinner into sandwiches and fritters. Even something as simple as toast could be presented in a whimsical, Americana-ish manner, stacked as “logs” in a cabin.

Not all of the recipes Estes includes are luxurious, however. Plenty are more log cabin than palace car. There’s broiled pig’s feet, creamed corn over toast, a stuffing for possum (or suckling pig), and plenty of pickles and relishes to preserve produce. Estes might have learned some of these homier dishes growing up in the South, and he also has recipes for Southern Black food such as chicken gumbo, fried chicken, and Brunswick stew. One wonders whether he ever served them to his monied customers.

As Estes explains in the one-page “Sketch of My Life” at the beginning of Good Things to Eat, he was born in Tennessee in 1857 and given the last name of the master who owned his mother’s family. The youngest of nine, Estes began taking on chores such as carrying water and driving cows at the age of 5, when many of the men, including slaves, left to fight in the Civil War. Two of his brothers died in it. 

In 1867, his mother moved her family – now free, thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment – to Nashville, where her mother lived. To help support the family with some extra money, the ten-year-old Estes milked cows and brought hot meals to fieldworkers. He started working at an elegant restaurant at 16 and stayed until he was 21, when he moved to Chicago. For two years he worked at a restaurant in the Loop, making $10 a week – some twenty times more than he made milking cows as a child.

It was in his next job that he found fame – and wealthy friends, who eventually encouraged him to write his cookbook. As railroad travel grew and George Pullman’s comfortable sleeper cars became the fashionable mode of transport, Estes – like the many freed slaves who became Pullman porters – joined the Pullman company. He cooked for them from 1883 until 1897, taking a break to accompany a couple on a boat trip to Japan. He then served a decade as the chef for a private train car owned by two successive tycoons.

“The recipes given in the following pages represent the labor of years,” he writes in Good Things to Eat, which he published in 1911 while working as a chef for U.S. Steel in Chicago. “Their worth has been demonstrated, not experimentally, but by actual tests, day by day and month by month, under dissimilar, and, in many instances, not too favorable conditions.”

Cooking in a small kitchen on a train or a ship in the days before modern appliances or refrigeration surely wasn’t easy. Preparing dishes in a home kitchen presented fewer hindrances, and Estes’ cookbook must have found some traction; the Chicago Defender noted that an autographed copy of it sold for $11, more than a week’s salary for Estes at his first Chicago restaurant job. It eventually went out of print, and seemingly few copies survived to the end of the twentieth century. (Estes died in Los Angeles in 1939.) But an Oklahoma publisher reprinted it from a copy that had been handed down from her great-grandmother, who had written approving comments next to favored recipes in the margins.

While the recipes are written straight through with minimal direction as to cooking times or measurements (although Estes does include a “table of weights and measures” that uses teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups), some are not that far from dishes that have survived to today: chicken pot pie (that’s actually chicken and dumplings), macaroni and cheese, glazed carrots and peas, corned beef hash. Some sound familiar but aren’t, like black bean soup that’s just slow cooked beans with flour, pepper, and lemon, or ice cream cake that has no ice cream but lots of egg whites. And plenty have disappeared: sweet wine soup served with sponge cake, steamed peanut meatose, trianon salad of grapefruit, orange, grapes, roquefort cheese, and a paprika-flavored vinaigrette.

Such bygone dishes may not be considered good things to eat anymore, but they apparently brought pleasure to those who ate Estes’ food more than a century ago. As he writes, “If it be true that real happiness consists in making others happy, the author can at least feel a sense of gratification in the thought that his attempts to satisfy the cravings of the inner man have not been wholly unappreciated by the many that he has had the pleasure of serving – some of whom are now his stanchest [sic] friends.”