History and Cooking - Antique Cookbooks

I took an unexpected hiatus from this blog for the last nine months. Despite following all precautions, COVID found us in December 2020. My dear hubby was sick for a week and is pretty much recovered except for one lingering problem.  I was actively sick for the better part of three weeks, and I ended up on a cocktail of meds, including steroids and an inhaler.  My throat was swollen and I had trouble swallowing pills.  I had crippling exhaustion that leveled me, and I didn't realize I had brain fog until I woke up one morning and realized how much sharper the edges of my brain had become. I had an especially scary Christmas night when both nostrils suddenly swelled up: my nose got so large that my dear hubby could see how big it had become across a 12-foot room. It was painful, like the two sides of my nose were fighting to take over the same space on my face. I got frightened when the back of my throat started to swell up as well. I could feel the top of my throat and t...

For my friends who like history and cooking, I have two books by Mary J. Lincoln. They are not to be confused with the more famous Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer. (I'll write about that in a future post).  Up until the late 1800s, generally you learned how to cook from your mother. For female children, it was simply a part of growing up that your chores reflected the domestic tasks that you would need to know how to do so one day you could take care of your own household.  A group of Boston philanthropists, influenced by seeing a cooking school in London, decided to open a school in 1879. They aimed to help people who wanted to cook for their families as well as those who wanted to become cooks for a living. A secondary aim was to be of particular benefit for those who were poor, such as the immigrants living in Boston's North End. The late 1800s was a boom time for immigration to the US; however, those who immigrated here often had a hard time coping with la...

For my friends who like history and cooking, I have a neat little book with some Chicago history. This small volume was published by B. Heller & Co., which was founded in the late 1880s as a wholesale manufacturer of ingredients used in meat preparation. The University of Chicago acquired a substantial collection of B. Heller company records and promotional materials, which you can read about by clicking here . The copy I have is a Seventh Edition, going back to its first publication in 1908. It first appears that the book was published to promote Heller products, but the overall tone of the book is much more educational. This was the era of the Pure Food and Drug Act, when the government cracked down on dangerous and dirty food manufacturing practices. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair came out in 1906, and the uproar caused by that book led to the safer and hygienic food that you eat today. Heller's Preface, taken in context of what had happened nationally in the two years before...

For my friends who like history and cooking, I have the greatest cookie cookbook ever written. Seriously. If you do not already own a copy of this cookbook, you owe it to yourself to pop over to Amazon and order one right now (I checked, and there is a 2002 reprint currently available.) When I was a kid, my mom's copy of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book was the one that I baked from the most. My dad has a sweet tooth, and every week we had something coming out of the oven which never lasted very long around him. I particularly enjoyed baking cakes and cookies, and this cook book has a tremendous variety of recipes. It has my all-time favorite recipes for chocolate brownies, butterscotch brownies, snickerdoodles, chocolate crinkles, and lemon squares (which I later modified into orange squares; substitute orange juice for the lemon juice - it's sublime!).  This book starts out with a "cooky primer" section divided into the six methods of cookies making: drop, bar refrigera...

  For my friends who like history and cooking, I have a real fun one. The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook is from 1959 (436 pages, authorship credited to "The Women of General Foods Kitchens"). It's loaded with full-color, full-page photographs and two-color drawings, and has an unusual square-ish size. I think of this as one of the first "modern" lifestyle cookbooks in its look and feel. (Modern, retro and dated all at once!) It has a marked difference in its approach to handling the recipes, which I think reflects the new prosperity in lifestyle and more leisure time that Americans found in the 1950s.  Instead of grouping similar foods together in chapters (e.g, Meats, Breads, Vegetables), General Foods organizes eight chapters around "everyday and special situations," including family meals, daytime entertaining, parties, meals outdoors, and holidays. Each chapter describes various scenarios under the topic, with sample menus and recipes.  Unique to...

For my friends who like history and cooking comes The White House Cook Book (1900, 590 pages), a thick white tome that has seen several iterations over the decades. I'd bet some of you may have your own copy.  My book is from 1900, the fourth copyrighted version. The original came out in 1887. The co-authors  listed are Hugo Ziemann, a White House steward; and Mrs. F.L. Gillette, whom the publishers note in their foreword "is no less proficient and capable, having made a life-long and thorough study of cookery and housekeeping, especially as adapted to the practical wants of average American homes." This book actually has very little to do with the White House, despite Ziemann's later involvement ( Fanny Gillette is the sole author and copyrighter of the original in 1887).  My 1900 version has full-page black-and-white photos of Ida Saxton McKinley and Frances Folsom Cleveland, with sketched collages of other First Ladies. There is a drawing of the White House kitche...