Around-the-world cook book

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

The Around-the-World Cook Book (1913) by Mary Louise Barroll is a sprawling household culinary manual assembled from recipes the author gathered through travel, friends, and American regional traditions, reflecting her identity as the wife of a naval officer. It moves through the full arc of early twentieth-century domestic cookery, from breads and hors d'oeuvres through soups, fish, entrees, vegetables, sauces, salads, preserves, desserts, cakes, candies, and beverages, before closing with household cleaning advice, beauty preparations, and home remedies. The book's international ambitions show in its French culinary terminology, its national variations on rice and macaroni dishes, and its recipes explicitly labeled with regional or ethnic names such as Turkish, Mexican, Spanish, and Creole preparations. Alongside food, it preserves a small number of household and medicinal entries, showing that cookbooks of this era doubled as general domestic references. Modern readers will find an unusually detailed record of upper-class American entertaining and housekeeping just before the First World War, including elaborate chafing-dish suppers, ornamental salads shaped like flowers, and alcohol-forward punches and cordials. As a document, it offers both a practical (if dated) cooking reference and a window into the domestic expectations, tastes, and anxieties of its time.

The book is organized into a large culinary section (Part I Receipts) followed by household and personal-care material. It opens with French cooking terminology and a table of bread and cake cooking times, then proceeds through breads, hors d'oeuvres, soups, fish, entrees (meats, game, poultry), meatless dishes, rice and macaroni, vegetables, eggs, sauces, salads, pickles and preserves, chafing-dish recipes, sandwiches, desserts, cakes and cookies, candies, and beverages. The final sections (11 and 12) shift away from food entirely into household cleaning and stain removal, furniture and metal care, personal grooming and perfumery, and home remedies, closing with an alphabetical index. Recipes are frequently presented in numbered variants (No. 1, No. 2) for the same dish, and many sections begin with technique notes or time-tables before listing individual recipes.