Cooking

This promotional recipe booklet is a striking adverstisment for White House Cereals.  Most likely published in the late 1930's, the front cover is fashioned as a 3-D commercial food carton while the back cover displays their full product line.  Bright yellow and die-cut, this booklet was intended as an eye-catching calling card.  Die-cutting dates back to the Victorian era when industrial machines could mass-produce and print the same attractive shapes over and over again, like the celebrated Victorian-era Valentines.

The Nickel Plate Road Railroad Industrial Development Department published The Market Basket in 1949 as a tribute to its late but forward-looking President, John W. Davin.  Davin the saw wisdom in bringing fresh foods quickly and efficiently from the farm to the table via railroad freight at a time when post-war America was booming (and in spite of working America's increased reliability and facination with prepared foods).  This cookbooklet features recipes from the wildly popular fine dining establishment, Gruber's Restaurant of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

"The only bread baked at the Chicago World's Fair."  Wonder Bakery was the first major company to adapt commerical bread slicers.  Imagine the "wonder" that was inspired when they exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934 just a few short years after the slicers were invented.  The exhibition baked, sliced, and packaged bread on the spot.  The Wonder book of good meals:  World's Fair Edition was given out as a keepsake/advertisement to fairgoers.  It includes recipes for every course, as well as defining "whitchery," the art of making sandwiches.

The Godey’s Lady’s Book was a widely read journal that pioneered the field of women’s magazines. When first published in 1830, it included mainly images of the current fashions, but later it expanded to include fiction, essays, and recipes. In 1870, the magazine published its first cookbook, The Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints. The book is a compilation of featured recipes along with a chapter of household and cooking advice. The chapter ends on a playful note with a poem —each couplet is a cooking tip or proverb.

Fannie Farmer, who was born in 1857, suffered a paralytic stroke in her teenage years that forced her to give up her formal education at the time.  She eventually found an interest in nutrition and cooking.  She enrolled at the Boston Cooking School and did so well that she joined the staff, eventually becoming head of the school. She is still an important and recognized figure in the study of American cookery.

This cookbook (a textbook published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) features beautiful, color, glossy, life-sized photos on every other page. Each food photograph glistens and drips with food juices, and you can almost see the steam rising off the pages of the book. Just as stated in the subtitle, this book contains recipes for the food you might find in "markets, [on] beaches, and [at] roadside stands" in Central America, the Caribbean, and in South America.

This pocket-sized booklet is part of a series of over 100 handbooks published by the American Topical Association, a philatelic society devoted to topical stamp collecting. Topical stamp collecting involves collecting stamps based on a specific subject or concept; examples are birds on stamps, trains on stamps, and people on stamps. There is even a club for people who like stamps on stamps. This book is about food on stamps.

Published by the New Mexico Philatelic Association, this thin 20 paged booklet is stuffed full of delicious recipes. Each recipe has a black and white image of a postage stamp next to it.

This book is roughly the size of your hand, but bubbling over with delicious recipes. Although there are no illustrations, the author uses words to paint a picture of mouth watering dishes from Barbados (British Caribbean island). In seventeen chapters and over 200 pages, the author shares her memoire, and shares recipes that are important to her personally. The recipes are not in the list template commonly found in cookbooks; they are creatively tucked inside the paragraphs and woven into her life story.

Jay Rosenberg's The impoverished students' book of cookery, drinkery, & housekeepery is the epitome of survival guides for college students.  Rosenberg, a Reed College alumnus and Doctor of Philosophy, divulges among other things, sage advice in his "What-the-hell-do-you-do-with" Liver recipe, shares his family's recipe for Hungarian Chicken Paprikash where it is reckoned it goes "back to Adam and Eve who got it from the Angel with the Flaming Sword," and includes advice on home-brewing, budgets, and attractive wall-groupings.

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.