cook

The Skillful Housewife's Book

This book was designed to guide and educate women about how to run what was then her main domain: the home. Discussing politeness and temper, bathing and exercise, simple house cures for ailments, how to preserve eggs and how to make “Splendid Johnny Cake,” this elegant small volume gives advice about everything and anything that exists and happens around a fashionable house. There are instructions even about how to remove grease from books!

The Pantropheon, or, History of Food, and Its Preparation

The son of a grocer, appropriately enough, Alexis Soyer (1810-1858) became a famous chef, indeed perhaps the first-ever “celebrity chef.”  Apprenticed at a restaurant in Paris, he quickly rose in the profession to become the chef for several French and English aristocrats and subsequently cemented his reputation as the chef de cuisine at the Reform Club in London.  Impressively – considering his clientele – he took an active interest in providing soup kitchens for the poor during the Irish famine of 1847 and worked with the British Army in the Crimea to improve the provisioning of army hosp

Royal Baker and Pastry Cook

The Royal baker and pastry cook: a manual of practical receipts for home baking and cooking by the Royal Baking Powder Company has become a royal mess.  Promotional cookbooks like this were never meant to survive; they were manufactured as ephemera to be distributed to customers on a local level to promote sales.  Their primary purpose was to advertise and promote their domestic usefulness.  (Helpful hint:  use baking powder to reduce the amount of eggs used in a recipe!)  This copy was provided to a Pennsylvania homemaker compliments of Hall Kaul & Hyde Co. of St.

Five Thousand Receipts in All the Useful and Domestic Arts

In an era before industrialization and mass-production, when every home has to make its own materials for daily life, this book of household recipes covers just about everything: as the lengthy title tells us, it ranges from the basics of cooking, preserving foods, and distilling, through practical matters such as medicines, tanning, horse-shoeing, and even metallurgy, to the finer arts of water-colors, oil painting, and enamelling.

Famous Personalities of Flight Cookbook

Published for the National Air and Space Museum by the Smithsonian Institution Press, this is a collection of favorite recipes from well-known fliers, astronauts, aviation legends, and space and aviation industrialists.  Included are recipes and personal anecdotes from pioneers like the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Robert Goddard; favorite food and drink recipes from fliers James Doolittle, Jacqueline Cochran, and Ernest Gann.