Cooking and castle-building

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Cooking and castle-building (1880) by Emma P. Ewing, with Marietta McPherson Greenough, is an unusual hybrid of domestic instruction and fiction. Rather than presenting recipes as a bare list, the book wraps them in a summer narrative set at a retreat called Maplewood, where a young woman named Alice, newly returned from Europe, learns practical cookery from her relative Cousin Kate and her cousin Emeline. Chapters move through bread and yeast making, griddle cakes, meats, vegetables, soups, fruit cookery, preserves, cakes, and pickles, all delivered through conversation, letters from friends, and reflective asides on housekeeping and domestic education. Woven through the culinary lessons is a subplot involving a mysterious invalid girl, the Douglas family, and a deceased mother's lost baby, giving the book a gothic undertone alongside its practical aims. The author repeatedly argues that good cooking rests on mastering fundamentals like bread and meat, not showy cakes and pastries, and that household work deserves the same respect as any other skilled occupation. Modern readers will find both a period cooking manual and a domestic novel of manners, useful for understanding how cookery was taught and moralized in genteel American households of the late nineteenth century. The book closes with a full alphabetical index of its recipes and topics.

The book is organized as eleven numbered chapters (rendered here across 10 mechanically gated sections) that follow a loose seasonal narrative at Maplewood, interspersing recipes with dialogue, letters, and philosophical digressions. Early sections (1 to 3) establish the frame story and cover bread, yeast, biscuits, and griddle cakes; middle sections (4 to 7) move through beverages, vegetables, meats, soups, and fruit cookery; later sections (8 and 9) turn to fried foods, breakfast dishes, domestic education, cakes, and preserves; section 10 closes the narrative and provides a comprehensive alphabetical index with page references.