The Marigold Cook Book: A Practical and Useful Collection of Southern Recipes

New York; Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company; Country Life Press, 1938. Large, comb-bound octavo (23.5 x 17 cm.), [6], 126 pages. Thumb indexed. FIRST EDITION. The cookbook of The Marigold, a popular Niagara Falls restaurant, issued in the year the restaurant underwent its first expansion. Recipes range from Dixie Cake to Dixie Bread to Dumplings. Despite its Western New York State origins, this is a Southern recipe collection. While owned and managed by Mary Baldwin, a white woman, the kitchen was operated by African-Americans, some of whom Baldwin brought up from the South. Baldwin also profited from her African-American employees by using an image of Ellen Robinson on dishware and on this cookbook without permission. Robinson took Baldwin to court over the misuse of her image, but did not prevail. The Marigold was in operation until 1956. There was also a Marigold Restaurant in New Orleans, opened in 1933. Internally clean and sound. In stiff paper-covered boards, bearing a "Mammy" illustration with title. Some mild abrasion to corners, otherwise very good. Inscribed in ink on the half-title, "gift to Ruth M. Holmes, from Marigold Owner" in the hand of the recipient, a serious collector of cookbooks. An additional pencil annotation on the front paste-down records the address of the Marigold company.