Early 20th Century Cooking
Hannah Tyszkiewitz
The Sanitarium Eclectic Cook Book
Portland: Portland Sanitarium Health Food Co., c. 1900
A vegetarian cookbook (that includes egg recipes), this cookbook was an imprint of the Portland Adventist Sanitarium, inspired by the teaching of Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium. It is explicitly a healthy eating cookbook, noting that ‘disorder of digestion is the most prevalent of all human ills” but unlike the household and health guides of the 19th century, it includes no recipes for medication or household cures—just recipes for breakfast, soups, breads, salads, desserts, and more.
TX715.T97 1900z
United Daughters of the Confederacy
Echoes of Southern Kitchens
Los Angeles: Western Printing Co., 1916
Community cookbooks of the late 19th and early 20th century touched upon regional cuisine, but following the Civil War, southern cookbooks became an identifiable genre. Cookbooks like Echoes provided recipes for popular Southern dishes, but also packaged and sold the Lost Cause myth to readers.
T715.2.S68E243 1916
Frigidaire Corporation
The Frigidaire Key to Meal Planning
Dayton: Frigidaire Corporation, 1933
Home refrigerators saw widespread use beginning in the late 1920s, and cookbooks soon responded. The opportunity to store food for longer meant the way home cooks planned meals changed, and Frigidaire seized the chance to promote their product with a corporate cookbook that sold the product as a way to save money long-term: “by carrying out the program of meal planning and marketing to its logical conclusion, you will substantially reduce your living expenses...your Frigidaire will pay for itself again and again through food savings.”
TX728.F74 1933
Blanche E. Leonard
Salad Book
Memphis: Blanche E. Leonard, 1910
The salad recipes are diverse, from French artichoke salad to halibut salad to a Waldorf fruit salad, but the focus is narrow—just salads in their many permutations. This represents a new era for cookbooks, which would focus on specific meals or cuisines, unlike the cookbooks of the 19th century which largely covered every course and foodstuff available to the middle-class American cook.
Click to cover to read to book
TX 740.L46 1910
Helen Cowles Lecron and Louise Bennett Weaver
A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband
New York: A.L. Burt Co., c. 1917
The structure of this cookbook was innovative, even if the message was not—written like a narrative story broken into chapters--’Sunday Dinner at the Dixon’s’; ‘Ruth Comes to Luncheon’, ‘Bettina Entertains a Small Neighbor’ where the story of Bettina, a newly married woman, carries on as an upper middle-class woman, interspersed with a relevant recipe or two at the end of each section. If the title was meant to be provocative or suggestive, the text abandons the premise.
TX715.W36 1917
Cream of Wheat Co.
Diamond Cook Book
Minneapolis: Cream of Wheat Company, c. 1900
The early 20th century saw the emergence of corporate cookbooks, published by companies selling food products (like Cream of Wheat) or kitchen tools, like refrigerators. Printed as advertisements, if the cookbooks were attractive and useful, they became a permeant part of the consumer’s home.
TX715.D53 1900
Joseph Campbell Company
Helps for the Hostess
Camden: J. Campbell Co., 1916
Canned soup is not typically considered a glamorous or sophisticated product. But that was the image the company took to advertise their product via this corporate cookbook, telling readers in the introduction that “the manner in which the regular meals are prepared and served is the true index of a family’s civilization and class.”
TX728.H44 1916
Coral Smith
New Dishes from Left-Overs
New York: Frederick A. Stokes company, 1933
Few cookbooks printed in the 1930s make explicit mention of the Great Depression or economic hardship. Coral Smith’s cookbook therefore stands out, opening with the promise to “talk with you as any two or three housewives do when they get together to exchange experiences and help each other out of difficulties by telling how they have solved hard problems or met unexpected emergencies. And it is the fact that our problems are harder than ever in these days of uncertain incomes.”
TX715.S6515 1933
Ida M. Chitwood
Choice Recipes, Food Charts, and Reducing Method
Fort Worth: The Bunker Printing Products Corporation, c. 1927
The 1920s saw a shift in beauty standards for American women, with a new emphasis on slimness. The cookbook market responded, with the emergence of ‘slimming’ and ‘reducing’ cookbooks. This cookbook offers nearly 100 pages of recipes similar to other cookbooks of the era, with plenty of dessert recipes, followed by an index featuring caloric intake suggestions by age, and a nutritional guide categorizing foods as either ‘fuel foods’, ‘building foods’, or ‘regulating foods’. The book ends with instructions for a nine day fast, where only buttermilk or grapefruit is consumed.
TX715.C3485 1927
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Guild Cook Book
Holdenville: St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 1937
The Guild Cook Book was published by a church group in Oklahoma in the midst of the Great Depression, and a year after the second wave of the Dust Bowl, yet begins, paradoxically, with a list of the rules for reducing, a calorie guide to popular food items, and a list of low-calorie foods.
TX715.G849 1937
Linda Hull Larne
The New Hostess of To-Day
New York: Scribner's, 1913
From the late 19th century through the 1910s, chaffing dishes were a celebrated appliance in American homes, and cookbooks catered to them. Welsh Rabbit, Lobster Newberg, and Chicken à la King were trendy dishes associated with Delmonico’s ‒ the New York City establishment considered America’s first fine dining restaurant. The inclusion of chaffing dish recipes suggests a desire by middle class families across the country to partake in glamorous dining at home.
TX715.L33 1913