Recipes and kitchen manuals

General cookbooks, from Mrs. Rorer’s pocket soup book to the 800-page Practical Cooking and Serving.

• 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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

• 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 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