homemaker

Paper Finds Many New Uses in the Home

“Paper – a new servant for the American home!” This cheery booklet was published by the Kalamazoo Vegetable Paper Company (KVP) in 1931 to promote their products. Aimed at the budget-conscious housewife, KVP provides tips and tricks to show how paper can help them improve their homemaking skills. Charmingly illustrated with green and orange line drawings, this slim volume is an excellent example of the importance of collecting ephemera. Paper provides insight to the growing popularity of home economics and the subsequent shift to marketing specifically to women.

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!

Electric Refrigerator Menus and Recipes

This 2nd edition of Electric refrigerator menus and recipes: recipes prepared especially for the General Electric refrigerator is dedicated to the "Modern Homemaker" and authored by the renowned dietitian, cookbook author, and radio show hostess Miss Alice Bradley, Principle of Miss (Fannie!) Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston, MA.

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.

What Shall I Cook Today?

"Do tell me how you get your French fried potatoes so crisp and dry?"  Shortening was invented by Proctor and Gamble (yes, the soap makers) in 1910 as an alternative to tallow.  In the 1930s, Spry began an advertising campaign that would rival Crisco for decades.  This Spry cookbook published around 1936 by another soapmaker, the Lever Brothers, uses the then new and trendy comic book motif to cleverly advertise their product.

Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving

This well-used volume, in its original, gold-decorated publisher's binding, provides the reader with simple rules to cook and present meals. Its preface states: "The aim of this book is to indicate how to serve dishes, and to entertain company at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as to give cooking receipts.