White House cook book : a selection of choice recipes original and selected, during a period of forty years' practical housekeeping
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- Email us at repoteam@lib.msu.edu
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- In Collections
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Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project
- Copyright Status
- No Copyright
- Date Published
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1887
- Subjects
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Cooking, American
- Material Type
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Cookbooks
- Language
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English
- Extent
- 521 pages, 5 unnumbered leaves of plates
- Permalink
- https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m5rv0j704
The introductory texts reproduced here were written by the original Feeding America team to contextualize the books that were selected for inclusion as part of the 2001 digitization project.
White House Cook Book: A Selection of Choice Recipes Original and Selected, During a Period of Forty Years' Practical Housekeeping.
Chicago: R.S. Peale & Co., 1887.
This has been one of America's most enduring cookbooks. It was in print, under varying names and guises for fifty years and has been reprinted, in whole or part, throughout the 20th century. Most early editions were printed on poor quality paper and so have not survived in easily usable form.
This is the first edition. It contains a frontispiece photograph of the wife of the President of the United States, a practice which continued for much of the life of the book.
The book was also published in a German language edition. It would be difficult to compile an exhaustive history of the printing of this volume without having access to the many, many variations in its publication. The important point to be made is that it was (and is) a very popular American cookbook and has been so for more than a century.
It is quite comprehensive with numerous household hints and tips in addition to hundreds of recipes. It is subtitled A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home Containing Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, Etc. And it has all of that - but also more. There are sections on carving, dyeing or coloring, French words in cooking, House-keepers' Time-Table, Management of State Dinners at the White House, and Food for the Sick.