So I am tired of talking about men.

Don’t get me wrong I know why we do and it is tremendously important but... currently, I’m tired of talking about men.

So I give you...

Female Narratives... (Hopefully a series of posts unless people find them awful) Where I’m gonna talk a little bit about badass women you’ve probably never heard of before. Because I’m tired of talking about men.

Amelia Simmons

Wrote a cookbook in 1796 (thrilling right?). Technically it is though. Amelia badass that she was wrote the first American cookbook:

‘American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.’

How badass is that title alone?

This was pretty significant both to burgeoning American culture but also because it was the first cookbook to ever:

• Promote the use of chemical leaving agents (potash, precurser to baking powder)

• Feature a roast turkey and cranberry sauce recipe

• Advocate for the use of maize instead of oats (hello cornbread)

• Feature a Johnnycake recipe

• Promote the use of yeast

Seriously though the cookbook is BADASS and the work women had to do back then just to produce a cake is incredible. Be sure to check it out, I’ll link at the bottom.

Ready for Amelia to get more badass?

Well, unfortunately not a lot is factually known about Amelia’s life. Despite being a bestselling author no one thought to really pay much attention to her (I wonder why?). But a bit about her has been cobbled together and is probably pretty accurate.

So the first printing of Amelia’s book was probably paid out of her own pocket, likely because publishers didn’t believe a cookbook would be particularly popular. However, the book was a huge hit, so much so that it went into multiple reprintings over a 30 year period. It was pirated; it was stolen, retitled, and republished and is now considered, by the Library of Congress, to be one of the books that shaped America.

Still not badass enough?

So Amelia was born an orphan and likely worked her way through almost the entirety of her life as a domestic servant. Having no formal education she had to outsource actually physically writing her book to a third party who made many deliberate errors (changing out recipes and the like) on the mistaken impression that they knew better what made for good cooking. They did not and the second edition was created mostly just to repair these errors, though the book was still mega-popular even with these significant issues.

How badass is that an illiterate woman authored a bestselling cookbook. Amelia literally had every recipe in that book memorized.

Go on go flip through it and just mull that over.

Amelia Simmons was a badass.

Amelia's Book: https://d.lib.msu.edu/fa/1#page/1/mode/2up Also other cool shit about her.

If you made it to this point with me, thank you for reading. It was fun writing about Amelia. If you hated it leave a comment and tell me to knock it off, that this is not the time or place. I’m being perfectly serious about this. For me personally I feel promoting the unsung trials and tribulations of women really important but not everyone shares that belief, so if you hated this and thought it was super off-topic for pink pill, please comment and tell me. If you liked it but find its off-topic for pink pill please tell me... otherwise, hopefully, I’ll get to do this again.