Free summaries
Cooking & Drinking — page 4
206 public-domain cooking & drinking books, summarised. Page 4 of 5.
La cuisine creole
Lafcadio Hearn
Creole cuisine is a vibrant, cosmopolitan tapestry woven from French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian, and Mexican influences, all converging in the unique cultural landscape of nineteenth-century New Orleans.
The Complete Distiller: Containing, I. The method of performing the various processes of distillation, with descriptions of the several instruments: the whole doctrine of fermentation: the manner of drawing spirits from malt, raisins, molasses, sugar, &c. and of rectifying them: with instructions for imitating, to the greatest perfection, both the colour and flavour of French brandies. II. The manner of distilling all kinds of simple waters from plants, flowers, &c. III. The method of making all the compound waters and rich cordials so largely imported from France and Italy
A. (Ambrose) Cooper
This technical manual serves as an exhaustive guide to the art of distillation, detailing the chemistry of fermentation and the practical creation of spirits, floral waters, and medicinal cordials for the eighteenth-century reader.
A treatise on the art of making good wholesome bread of wheat, oats, rye, barley and other farinaceous grains: Exhibiting the alimentary properties and chemical constitution of different kinds of bread corn, and of the various substitutes used for bread, in different parts of the world
Friedrich Christian Accum
A rigorous nineteenth-century chemical study reveals the hidden science behind daily bread and exposes the widespread, hazardous adulterations lurking within the public food supply.
Domestic French Cookery, 4th ed
Sulpice Barué
A practical nineteenth-century guide adapts refined European culinary techniques for home kitchens across the Atlantic, substituting exotic equipment with everyday household tools to make sophisticated dining accessible, direct, and unpretentious.
Gel It! Easy Ways to be a Spectacular Cook
Inc. Knox Gelatine
Transform everyday meals into structured culinary showcases through speed, temperature control, and unflavored gelatine.
Nelson's Home Comforts: Thirteenth Edition
Mary Hooper
Mastering Victorian domestic management requires a shrewd blend of kitchen economy, exact chemical technique, and modern culinary convenience.
How to Use and Enjoy Your New Frigidaire Refrigerator
General Motors Corporation. Frigidaire Division
This artifact offers a glimpse into mid-century domestic life, blending technical guidance for a new household appliance with a comprehensive collection of frozen recipes designed for the modern kitchen of 1947.
Living on a Little
Caroline French Benton
A young woman learns to balance the books and the stove, transforming the daunting prospect of a limited income into a graceful, well-managed home.
Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition): How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs
Anonymous
This practical guide offers a glimpse into the diverse, creative, and often labor-intensive world of early 20th-century home vegetable cookery. It serves as both a manual for the aspiring gardener-cook and a time capsule of culinary traditions that have largely faded from the modern kitchen.
Favorite Dishes
Carrie V. Shuman
HOOK This collection of period recipes, curated by the women who organized the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, offers a rare, intimate window into the domestic arts and social aspirations of late nineteenth-century America.
What to Eat, How to Serve it
Christine Terhune Herrick
The family table serves as the vital, daily rallying-point of the home, grounding domestic life through the consistent rhythms of preparation, service, and shared nourishment. This practical guide offers a thoughtful blueprint for managing that space with grace, efficiency, and economy.
Outdoor Cooking with Reynolds Wrap: How to prepare tastier campfire meals without pots, pans and dishes
Reynolds Metals Company
The humble roll of aluminum foil serves as the ultimate camp kitchen, replacing heavy ironware with a lightweight, disposable, and versatile solution for the modern outdoorsman.
Pies Made with Pet Evaporated Milk
Pet Milk Company. Home Economics Department
A reliable guide to mid-century dessert making, this collection focuses on the versatility of a single pantry staple to create everything from classic custard to airy chiffon.
Tea-blending as a fine art
Joseph M. Walsh
This manual serves as a nineteenth-century guide for grocers, transforming the complex global commerce of tea into a structured, learnable craft for the shopkeeper.
The American Housewife: Containing the Most Valuable and Original Receipts in All the Various Branches of Cookery
Anonymous
This practical guide demystifies the nineteenth-century kitchen, offering precise instructions for everything from roasting beef to dyeing fabrics. It serves as an essential bridge to understanding the domestic labor and culinary standards of early American life.
Substitutes for Flesh Foods: Vegetarian Cook Book
Edwin Giles Fulton
This practical manual offers a turn-of-the-century perspective on meatless living, blending early health-food advocacy with a vast array of recipes for plant-based roasts, soups, and salads.
The Story of a Loaf of Bread
T. B. (Thomas Barlow) Wood
This concise technical exploration demystifies the complex journey of wheat from the soil to the dinner table. It bridges the gap between agricultural science and the everyday loaf, revealing the hidden labor behind a staple food.
Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them
Cora Moore
Cooking is an act of creative economy, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary through the artful application of seasoning and a dedicated focus on variety. This guide invites the home cook to move beyond the repetitive cycles of American kitchens by adopting the French philosophy of the "little dinner.
The cult of the chafing dish
Frank Schloesser
A small metal pan over a spirit flame can turn leftover scraps into culinary triumphs while quietly asserting a bachelor’s independence.
Chinese recipes
Nellie C. (Nellie Choy) Wong
Simple home cooking bridges cultures through a precise, welcoming guide to domestic Chinese cuisine written for twentieth-century Western kitchens.
Selections from Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes and USDA Favorites
Ruth Van Deman
This 50th-anniversary volume bridges broadcast history and practical home cooking, preserving early federal radio recipes alongside modern, laboratory-tested updates.
The Natural History of Chocolate: Being a Distinct and Particular Account of the Cocoa-Tree, its Growth and Culture, and the Preparation, Excellent Properties, and Medicinal Vertues of its Fruit
D. Quélus
An eye-witness account written after fifteen years in the Caribbean dismantles colonial myths to map the true biology, cultivation, and medicinal uses of cacao.
The Curry Cook's Assistant
Daniel Santiagoe
Authentic regional spices, carefully adapted methods, and practical home cooking form the foundation of this straightforward 1889 culinary guide.
A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-making
Sylvester Graham
A passionate nineteenth-century plea for nutritional integrity, this text treats the simple, unbolted loaf as the foundation of physical health, moral character, and household virtue.
An Ideal Kitchen: Miss Parloa's Kitchen Companion: A Guide for All Who Would Be Good Housekeepers
Maria Parloa
A model kitchen is not merely a room for work, but a carefully engineered hub where thoughtful design replaces needless labor. By prioritizing efficiency, ventilation, and logical storage, any domestic space can be transformed into a site of order and ease.
Gala-Day Luncheons: A Little Book of Suggestions
Caroline French Benton
This collection of turn-of-the-century menu plans and decorative schemes transforms the act of hosting into an imaginative, ritualized theater of hospitality. It serves as a comprehensive manual for the hostess who seeks to weave domestic routine into the fabric of the calendar year.
Camp Cookery. How to Live in Camp
Maria Parloa
This guide acts as a bridge between the refinement of Victorian domestic life and the rugged, unpredictable reality of the nineteenth-century American wilderness. It transforms the intimidating prospect of “roughing it” into a manageable, orderly endeavor.
Breakfast dainties
Thomas J. (Thomas Jefferson) Murrey
The first meal of the day need not be a monotonous chore of lukewarm coffee and burnt toast. By applying professional culinary standards to home kitchens, even the most hurried morning can become an occasion for genuine refinement.
Camping and camp cooking
Frank A. Bates
Living under canvas requires more than just a tent; it demands a philosophy of self-reliance, good humor, and the ability to cook a decent meal over an open flame. This manual serves as a practical guide for the city-dweller seeking a restorative escape into the woods.
Practical Italian recipes for American kitchens
Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti
This collection of home-style recipes provides an authentic window into the Italian kitchen of the early twentieth century, designed to bring traditional, nourishing meals to the tables of American homes. It serves both as a practical culinary guide and a poignant historical record of a time when the simple act of…
Collectors' Items: Fifty Superb Recipes from Spice Islands
Spice Islands Company
Elevating the home kitchen through the precise application of curated seasonings, these recipes invite the cook to treat flavor as a deliberate, refined art. This collection serves as a portal to an era of culinary sophistication, where pantry staples are transformed into global delicacies.
Carving and Serving
Mary J. (Mary Johnson) Lincoln
A calm, methodical manual turns the chaos of the dining table into an exercise in domestic grace, precision, and quiet consideration for others.
One hundred & one Mexican dishes
Unknown
A collection of diverse, rustic recipes from early 20th-century California and Mexico, this manual presents a culinary bridge between cultures. It captures a specific era’s fascination with regional flavors and traditional methods of preparation.
Ten Dollars Enough: Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week: How It Has Been Done
Catherine Owen
With rigorous organization and a flair for the culinary arts, a young woman proves that a household can be managed with both elegance and economy on a strict weekly budget.
Family fare
United States. Agricultural Research Service. Human Nutrition Research Division
Feeding a family with both nutrition and economy in mind requires planning, knowledge of ingredients, and a repertoire of reliable recipes. This practical handbook distills government research into a guide for everyday home cooking.
Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous
Unknown
This practical guide dispels the common fear of wild fungi, inviting the American public to harvest a nutritious, spontaneous food source that has long gone to waste in our forests.
My Pet Recipes, Tried and True: Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec
Various
A collection of time-tested kitchen wisdom, this volume preserves the domestic culture of Quebec at the turn of the century through the shared recipes of a local church community. It serves as a culinary time capsule, blending traditional methods with the practical needs of household management.
Grocers' Goods: A Family Guide to the Purchase of Flour, Sugar, Tea, Coffee, Spices, Canned Goods, Cigars, Wines, and All Other Articles Usually Found in American Grocery Stores
Frederick B. (Frederick Bartlett) Goddard
Modern kitchens often prioritize speed and convenience, but this compendium reminds us that the simple act of grocery shopping was once a sophisticated exercise in connoisseurship and consumer defense. It serves as a practical, century-old manual for selecting the best ingredients, offering a detailed snapshot of…
The National Cook Book, 9th ed
Hannah Mary (Bouvier) Peterson
This mid-nineteenth-century culinary manual provides a comprehensive look at the daily foodways of American households, focusing on practical, straightforward instruction. It serves as a window into a time when home kitchens were the center of self-sufficiency.
Food and Health
Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company
A blend of household management and health advocacy, this volume serves as a curious bridge between domestic utility and the era of patent medicine. It offers a window into the daily lives and health concerns of women in the early twentieth century.
How to Make Candy: A Complete Hand Book for Making All Kinds of Candy, Ice Cream, Syrups, Essences, Etc., Etc
Anonymous
A nineteenth-century manual of confectionery opens a window into a forgotten world of domestic science, where sugar transforms into delicate architecture through chemical precision, painstaking physical labor, and surprisingly hazardous ingredients.
Tested Recipes: Waterless Cooking for Better Meals, Better Health
N.Y.) Tested Recipe Institute (New York
Precision-engineered for the post-war kitchen, this mid-century manual transforms low-heat, minimal-liquid cooking into an exacting science of domestic efficiency and preserved nutrition.
The Oyster: Where, How and When to Find, Breed, Cook and Eat It
Eustace Clare Grenville Murray
HOOK This guide reveals the secret lives and culinary possibilities of the oyster, blending natural history with the etiquette of the Victorian dining table.
The Production of Vinegar from Honey
Gerard W. Bancks
Pure honey mixed with water and left to the work of microscopic fungi yields a gentle, aromatic table condiment far superior to the harsh, chemically manipulated vinegars common to industrial domestic markets.
The Country Housewife and Lady's Director in the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm
Richard Bradley
This practical compendium offers an immersive, month-by-month guide to the industrious management of a country estate, blending sophisticated culinary arts with the seasonal rhythms of farm life. It serves as both a manual for self-sufficiency and a blueprint for elegant hospitality in the eighteenth century.
Things Mother Used to Make: A Collection of Old Time Recipes, Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before
Lydia Maria Gurney
This collection offers a rare, direct link to the early American kitchen, preserving a century of domestic knowledge through simple, reliable instructions for the home cook. It captures a time when resourcefulness was the primary ingredient.
Reform Cookery Book (4th edition): Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century
Mrs. (Jean Oliver) Mill
A century-old guide to vegetarian living, this manual provides practical, wholesome recipes designed to replace the "spicy sausage" and "sodden beans" of traditional fare with more thoughtful and digestible nutrition.
The cake and biscuit book
Elizabeth Douglas
Mastery of the oven requires a sympathetic hand and a careful eye, turning simple ingredients into a variety of timeless comforts. This collection of recipes celebrates the art of baking with elegance and precision.