A text-book of cooking

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

A text-book of cooking is a 1915 American home economics textbook by Carlotta Cherryholmes Greer, structured as a graduated course of lessons rather than a simple recipe collection. It blends practical kitchen instruction with scientific explanation, walking students through combustion and stove operation, measurement, the chemistry of starches and sugars, protein cookery, and progressively more complex meal preparation. The book is organized as a series of numbered lessons covering categories such as vegetables, eggs, dairy, meats, fish, legumes, breads, preserving, and desserts, interspersed with experiments meant to demonstrate cooking principles like starch gelatinization, fat clarification, and protein coagulation. Later sections move beyond the kitchen into household management topics: menu planning, luncheon boxes, sick-room feeding, formal dining service and etiquette, food costing, caloric requirements, and child and infant feeding. The book closes with an extensive index and a final reader-requested pie crust recipe appended almost as an afterthought. Written for students, likely in a school or home economics classroom setting, the text treats cooking as an applied science requiring observation and reasoning, not rote memorization. Modern readers will find it a rich record of early twentieth-century American domestic science education, nutritional theory, and kitchen technology.

The book is arranged in two main parts across numbered Lessons, beginning with fuels, ranges, and measurement (section 1), then moving through starches and sugars, soups, eggs and dairy, meats, fish, legumes, vegetables, salads, beverages, and frozen desserts (sections 2 and 4 through 8). Section 13 covers advanced preserving techniques (canning, jams, jellies, relishes) and holiday foods. Sections 14 through 16 shift into household and nutritional science: menu making, the luncheon box, sick-room trays, formal dining service and etiquette, food costing, Calorie calculation, and diet for children and infants. Section 17 provides an outline of all lessons in Part I and Part II along with an alphabetical index, and section 18 concludes with the index and a final appended pie crust recipe. The lesson numbering (Roman numerals such as Lesson I, IV, XVI, XXIV) suggests the book was designed for sequential classroom use.