housewife
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 American Woman's Home
This manual on homemaking, an important handbook for a 19th century homemaker, was co-written by the Beecher sisters (as in Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame). By creating this manual, the authors were hoping to provide professional level instruction to women running a servant free household. The book educates on a wide array of areas that women encountered every day at home, including how to prepare and serve healthful foods, how to properly ventilate the kitchen, how to tastefully decorate the home, and how to properly play hostess to a variety of guests.
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.
Das Weisse Haus Kochbuch
Translated into German from the original “White House cookbook” first published in 1887, this book served the rising and prospering German-speaking immigrant population of the period. As the lengthy sub-title tells us, it’s more than just a cookbook –it is an encyclopaedic compendium of recipes for foods, salves and medicaments, lotions and personal products, cleaning and polishing compounds, etc.
The White House Cook Book
First published in 1887, this book proved enormously popular and stayed in print for decades (each new edition featuring a frontispiece portrait of the current First Lady). Co-author Hugo Ziemann served as steward in the White House, providing the book its title, but Mrs.
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.
The Godey's Lady's Book Receipts and Household Hints
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.
Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book
Catharine Esther Beecher was born in 1800, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, an outspoken minister and co-founder of the American Temperance Society. Her younger sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, well-known abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Disappointed in the limited curriculum available to young women during her own school years, Catharine became a teacher in 1821 and a strong advocate for women’s education. In 1823 she opened a private girls’ school, the Hartford Female Seminary, in Hartford, CT. Harriet graduated from the Seminary and later helped her sister there.
The New Cyclopædia of Domestic Economy
This 1872 book offers guidance to “the inexperienced housewife.” It is organized into three parts – housekeeping, cooking, and pharmaceutical concerns – and includes 5,000 practical receipts and maxims “from the best English, French, German, and American sources.” The editor of the volume was E. F. (Elizabeth Fries) Ellet, an American writer, historian, and poet who published her first book of poetry at age 17. She also wrote a three-volume history titled The Women of the American Revolution.
