Cook books

American and British kitchen manuals from 1894 to 1922: school-of-cookery textbooks, church and club recipe collections, wartime canning primers and the first vegetarian cookbooks sold to ordinary households.

• A Treatise on Flour, Yeast, Fermentation and Baking, Together with Recipes for Bread and Cakes

  Julius Emil Wihlfahrt · 1914

  Written in 1914 for the baking trade, this treatise starts with the flour itself: gluten, water absorption, color, moisture, malt extract and the acids in wheat. The recipes that follow are built around…

  Contents85 sections listed

• Best Recipes For Baking. A Book For The Home

  John William Schroers · 1907

  A 1907 baking book for the home kitchen that reads like it was written by a professional: home-made and dry hop yeast, salt-rising bread, Parker House and ring rolls, coffee cake and a long run of cakes and…

  Contents85 sections listed

• Brewster Book Of Recipes

  Woman’s Association of Brewster Congregational Church · 1921

  A Detroit church cookbook from 1921, compiled from members’ recipes. Community cookbooks like this one raised money and recorded what a congregation actually cooked; this one runs from oyster cocktails to…

  Contents152 sections listed

• Canning, Preserving And Pickling

  Marion Harris Neil · 1914

  Neil’s 1914 book is the biggest preserving title on the shelf, 254 sections tested in her own cookery school. Note the chapters on oven canning and on canning with a fireless cooker, two methods that have…

  Contents254 sections listed

• Canning, Preserving Pickling and Fruit Desserts

  Jeanette C. Van Duyn · 1921

  A 1921 manual with 175 sections, starting with the science of canning and the choice of jars and sterilisers, then vegetables, meat, fruit, jams, pickles and fruit desserts.

  Contents175 sections listed

• Capital City Recipes

  Woman’s Auxiliary, First Presbyterian Church, Raleigh · 1908

  A Southern church cookbook of 1908 from Raleigh, North Carolina, drawn from the handwritten recipe books of local housekeepers: gumbo, shad, deviled crabs, stuffed ham, croquettes. Its soup chapter opens with…

  Contents57 sections listed

• Cooking Hints and Helps to Reduce the Cost of Living

  Cecilia K. Bradt · 1912

  A bank’s budget cookbook from 1912: the housewife’s problem “in a nutshell”, cheap cuts of meat, meat substitutes, leftovers, milk and vegetables, and desserts and cakes at small cost. Fifteen sections…

  Contents15 sections listed

• Dainties

  Sarah Tyson Rorer · 1912

  Dainties is Rorer’s party book: cocktails in the old sense (an appetizer of oysters, fruit or vegetables, not a mixed drink), punches and frappés, small cakes, creamed and stuffed candies, frozen puddings and…

  Full text67 sections

• Every Woman's Cook Book, Recipes And Food Combinations For The Household

  Helen M. Wells · 1922

  A 1922 San Francisco cookbook from the National League for Woman’s Service. It is the newest book on the shelf, and it plans whole meals, “combinations of various foods”, rather than listing recipes alone.

  Contents33 sections listed

• Everywoman’s Canning Book

  Mary B. Hughes · 1918

  A 1918 wartime primer from Boston. Hughes wrote it out of the canning kitchen run for war relief, where she says 8,000 jars were sealed without a loss, and she aimed it at ordinary kitchens. The book covers…

  Full text42 sections

• Home Canning Recipes And Instructions

  Butler Mfg. Co. · 1917

  A 1917 company booklet that teaches canning while selling the canner: directions for operating Butler canning outfits, loading the cooker, sterilization tables for vegetables and fruit, and a section on meats.

  Contents14 sections listed

• Mrs. Rorer's Vegetable Cookery And Meat Substitutes

  Sarah Tyson Rorer · 1909

  Rorer wrote this in 1909 without being a vegetarian herself, and says so in the preface: she is not promoting a cult, only showing how to replace meat well. The book groups vegetables by what they do in the…

  Contents226 sections listed

• My Best 250 Recipes

  Sarah Tyson Rorer · 1907

  Rorer picked these 250 recipes herself in 1907, by then a quarter-century into teaching, and grouped them in tens and twenties: twenty soups, twenty fish, twenty breads and biscuits, fifteen ices, ten cold…

  Full text124 sections

• One Hundred And One Practical Non-Flesh Recipes

  Margaret Blatch · 1917

  Numbered recipes, one to 101, from a vegetarian household in 1917: cream soups, sandwich pastes, nutmeat patties and savouries, chosen for nourishment, digestibility and “dainty dishing up”.

  Contents103 sections listed

• One Hundred Meatless Dishes

  Alice G. Schirmer · 1914

  A slim 1914 book for people moving to a meatless diet: soups, nut and legume dishes, macaroni and rice, vegetables, eggs, sandwiches and salads. Schirmer says plainly that it is not meant as a general cookbook.

  Contents19 sections listed

• Perfection in Baking

  Emil Braun · 1902

  A trade baker’s manual from 1902, opening with three kinds of puff paste (American, French and Dutch) and moving through pies, tarts and cakes. Braun is unusually frank about adjusting a recipe when the usual…

  Contents76 sections listed

• Popular Dishes

  Emily Marian Colling · 1906

  A lecturer’s collection from 1906, with early instructions for cooking on a gas range: planking and broiling fish, broiling steak, roasting, frying on gas, baking and toasting, then soups and the rest of the…

  Contents135 sections listed

• Practical Cookery

  Hannah C. Dutaud · 1914

  A 1914 school manual: how to work in a kitchen, rules for dishwashing and serving, the chemistry of food, the principal methods of cooking and a table of cooking temperatures, before the recipes begin.

  Contents107 sections listed

• Practical Cooking And Serving

  Janet McKenzie Hill · 1919

  This is the backbone of the shelf: 825 sections, and the archive kept every one of them. Hill opens with chemistry (the five food principles, how heat changes starch and albumen) before she reaches a single…

  Full text825 sections

• Preserving And Pickling

  Mary M. Wright · 1918

  Two hundred recipes for preserves, conserves, jellies, jams, marmalades, pickles and relishes, 1917 to 1918. The chapter on new preserves from combined fruits is the most inventive part.

  Contents92 sections listed

• Preserving At Home: A Book For The Home Economist

  Emily Riesenberg · 1921

  A home-economics teacher’s preserving book, 1921 edition: principles, utensils, nineteen canning recipes, then jams, preserves, jellies and marmalades. Riesenberg opens by defending fruit as food rather than…

  Contents58 sections listed

• Save It For Winter.

  Frederick Frye Rockwell · 1918

  Rockwell’s 1918 book argues that civilization rests on keeping food for later, then gets practical: what canning, drying, pickling and storing each do, which vegetables keep best, and how to get the raw…

  Contents82 sections listed

• Tested Recipes for the Modern Hostess

  Daisy Wilson Barnet · 1906

  A hostess’s book of 1906: canapés, oyster cocktails, a run of soups (Palestine, pistachio, orange), entrées and party dishes. A handful of its pages survived in full; the rest are listed with their first lines.

  Part text4 of 57 sections

• The Laurel Health Cookery

  Evora Bucknum Perkins · 1911

  A large Adventist health cookbook of 1911, 447 sections long, on non-flesh cooking: utensils, measurements, flavorings, garnishes, salads and fruits, then the full range of dishes. About fifty sections…

  Part text47 of 447 sections

• The Orange Judd Cook Book

  Adeline O. Goessling · 1914

  A plain, large farm-kitchen cookbook from 1914, with 311 sections that start with eleven kinds of soup. Goessling’s introduction aims it at families “where plain tastes and limited means forbid extravagant or…

  Part text4 of 311 sections

• The White Ribbon Cook Book

  Kathryn Armstrong · 1894

  A temperance cookbook of 1894. Armstrong’s preface sets out to prove that “no culinary requirement” needs wine or brandy, and the 324 sections, from cooking times for meat to milk soup, keep the promise.

  Part text9 of 324 sections

• Twenty Quick Soups

  Sarah Tyson Rorer · 1894

  A pocket booklet from 1894: six short sections, twenty soups in all, from cream of asparagus to a cold currant soup for summer lunches. Every soup is built to be ready quickly, which in Rorer’s kitchen meant…

  Full text6 sections