The international cook book

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The International Cook Book (1929) by Margaret Weimer Heywood is a large American household reference that blends everyday domestic cookery with recipes credited to professional chefs from hotels and ocean liners around the world. Built around 873 anchored food records, it moves from menu planning and formal table service through an enormous run of breads, cakes, preserves, cookies, desserts, fish, meats, eggs, pastries, and poultry, before closing with a section explicitly devoted to international dishes from named chefs and establishments, and finally a technique and reference section with charts, garnishing advice, and kitchen tips. The book presents itself as a complete manual for the homemaker, covering not just recipes but the social choreography of dinners, suppers, teas, children's meals, invalid cookery, and picnics. Readers today will find it a window into 1920s American ideas of proper hospitality, nutrition, and kitchen science, alongside a genuinely international ambition unusual for household cookbooks of its era, drawing on cuisines from France, Japan, Greece, Mexico, Germany, Turkey, and elsewhere. It rewards both practical use and cultural reading, showing how domestic and professional cookery were imagined to intersect in the interwar American kitchen.

The book is organized into five stated sections (per section 1): menus and table service, recipes, international recipes, cookery technique, and an index. In practice the mechanically gated sections trace this arc: sections 1 to 3 cover introduction, formal dining customs, holiday and tea menus, and special feeding situations (children, invalids, picnics, unexpected guests) before recipes begin. Sections 4 through 11 form the bulk of the domestic recipe chapters, organized by course and category, breads and rolls, cakes, icings and candies, preserves and pickles, cookies, desserts, fish, frozen dishes, fruit and cereals, meats and meat substitutes, and eggs, pancakes, pies, and the start of poultry. Sections 14 and 15 shift into the book's distinctive international chapters, presenting chef-attributed dishes from named hotels and countries, organized loosely by cuisine and technique rather than course. Section 16 closes the book with cookery technique: garnishing, carving, reference charts for temperatures and measures, and fifty practical kitchen hints. Numbered chapters (for example Chapter III Dinners, Chapter XIII, Chapter XIX Frozen Dishes, Chapter XXV Poultry) run throughout and are the book's primary internal signposting.