Quantity cookery

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Quantity Cookery (1922) is a professional manual for institutional food service, written by Lenore Richards and Nola Treat of the University of Minnesota. Rather than a domestic cookbook for the home kitchen, it addresses the practical problems faced by caterers, cafeteria managers, and food service administrators who must plan meals for large groups. The book opens with principles of menu planning, nutrition, and palatability before moving into extensive recipe collections scaled for institutional volume, from potatoes and breads to salads, desserts, cakes, pies, and beverages. Recipes are given with ingredient quantities in multiple measurement units, calorie counts, serving yields, and cost calculations, reflecting the book's purpose as a working tool for large-scale food production rather than a book of literary or domestic charm. A table of weights and measures and a comprehensive index close the volume, aiding quick reference in a busy institutional kitchen. For the modern reader, this book offers a window into early twentieth-century American food service management, showing how nutrition science, budgeting, and standardized production intersected in an era before modern industrial catering software or regulation.

The book is organized in four main sections corresponding to logical stages of institutional menu planning and execution. Section 1 lays out foundational principles of menu design, standards for judging meals, types of menus, and sample thirty-day cafeteria rotations. Section 4 moves into practical recipes for vegetables, breads, sandwiches, salads, and hot desserts. Section 5 continues with cold desserts, cakes, fillings, frostings, and pies. Section 6 concludes with additional pie fillings, beverage recipes, a table of weights and measures, and an alphabetical index. Recipes throughout are grouped by category and course rather than presented as a single alphabetical list, with headings marking chapters and subtopics such as specific vegetable preparations or dessert types.