The century cook book

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

The Century Cook Book (1894) by Jennie A. Hansey is a large late-Victorian American household manual that pairs an extensive general cookbook with home medical and personal-care guidance. Its recipe sections run from soups, fish, and shellfish through meat, poultry, game, sauces, salads, eggs, vegetables, breads, cakes, custards, puddings, pastry, pies, pickles, preserves, candy, and beverages, before moving into dishes for invalids, table setting, etiquette, and elaborate 'artistic cookery' from a named chef. The book then shifts into a substantial domestic and medical section covering personal grooming, household cleanliness, emergency treatment, sick-room nursing, and a long 'Family Doctor' catalog of common ailments and their remedies. The preface states the intent to use plain American terms rather than foreign culinary language, though the artistic cookery chapter later draws on French-style presentation and a named professional chef. Readers today will find it useful as a window into how one late-nineteenth-century household guide integrated cooking, entertaining, hygiene, and medicine into a single reference. The anchored records show it is overwhelmingly a food recipe collection, with smaller but notable household and medicinal content woven throughout.

The book opens with front matter (section 1) including a preface, index, golden rules for the kitchen, garnishing notes, and conversion tables. It then proceeds through a long sequence of cooking chapters in roughly this order: soups and fish (sections 2), meats and poultry (section 4), sauces and salads (sections 5-6), vegetables, breads, and cakes (sections 6-8), custards, puddings, and pastry (sections 9-10), pies, pickles, preserves, candy, and beverages (sections 10), and dishes for invalids alongside table setting and etiquette (sections 11-12). A distinct 'Artistic Cookery' chapter attributed to Chef Urbain Dubois follows with elaborate remove, entree, and dessert presentations (sections 12-14). The book then turns to personal and household care, including bathing, skin, hair, and dental recipes (section 14), and closes with an extended medical section covering emergency treatment, sick-room management, and a 'Family Doctor' compendium of diseases and remedies (sections 16-19). Section 3 and section 15 are not present in the supplied summaries, so some connective material between the fish/meat chapters and between the artistic cookery and personal-care chapters is not described here.