Mary Randolph (1762–1828) was born on the Tuckahoe Plantation at Ampthill, Virginia. In 1824 she published The Virginia House-Wife, the earliest known southern cookbook in print, regarded by many as the finest work ever to have come out of the American kitchen. Its popularity and influence were such that it had gone through at least nineteen editions by 1860 and only the increasingly general adoption of the kitchen range finally made the work seem old-fashioned. Even so, it continued to be massively plagiarized down through the century. After Randolph’s death in 1828 in Washington, D.C., however, the work was seriously compromised by bowdlerization in an effort to make it seem more up-to-date.
