The chafing-dish supper

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The Chafing-Dish Supper is an 1894 specialty cookbook by Christine Terhune Herrick devoted entirely to cooking with the chafing-dish, a tabletop apparatus heated by a spirit or asbestos lamp that was popular for informal entertaining in late nineteenth-century American households. The book moves from practical equipment advice through a structured sequence of recipes covering eggs, fish, shellfish, meats, and leftovers, all adapted to the constraints and possibilities of chafing-dish cooking. Herrick frames the chafing-dish as a tool suited to many social situations, from bachelor apartments to Sunday-night suppers and impromptu entertaining when unexpected guests arrive. Beyond individual recipes, the book offers a philosophy of chafing-dish entertaining, treating the dish prepared at the table as the centerpiece of the meal rather than an incidental course. Modern readers will find a compact, single-purpose volume with roughly 95 anchored food records, organized in ten chapters, concluding with sample menus and an index. It offers a window into a specific and short-lived mode of genteel American home entertaining, valuable for its narrow focus and clear instructional voice rather than for breadth of subject matter.

The book is organized into numbered chapters that progress logically through chafing-dish cookery. It opens with justifications for when to use the chafing-dish (Chapter I) and practical guidance on equipment, fuel, and lamps (Chapter II), as reflected in section 1. It then moves through dedicated recipe chapters: eggs (Chapter III), fish (Chapter IV), and oysters, clams, and scallops (Chapter V), continuing in section 2 with further shellfish and crustacean recipes, then entrees of offal and meats, vegetables, cheese dishes, and reheated poultry and meat. Section 3 covers the final material: reheating beef and mutton, a chapter on the philosophy of chafing-dish entertaining, sample menus for Sunday-night and midnight suppers, practical advice on impromptu suppers and pantry staples, and a concluding index (Chapter X) of all recipes in the volume.