Mrs. Ericsson Hammond's salad appetizer cook book...

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

Published in 1924, Mrs. Ericsson Hammond's Salad Appetizer Cook Book is a specialized companion volume to the author's earlier 1918 cookbook, focused narrowly on appetizers, salads, sauces, and formal cold-dish presentation. The book opens with instructions on dissolving Cox's gelatine and preparing artificial aspic, tools that recur throughout the collection's many aspic-glazed and molded dishes. The bulk of the book presents hundreds of recipes, most bearing personalized French-style names such as 'a la Ericsson Hammond' or 'a la Gimo,' covering smoked salmon and caviar canapes, elaborate sandwiches, composed salads, cold and hot sauces, fish and poultry entrees, meat dishes made from leftovers, frozen desserts, cakes, and pastries. Recipes are typically given with both French and English titles, precise serving quantities, and detailed instructions for plating, piping, and garnishing with truffles, colored butters, and spun sugar. The final pages offer sample multi-course dinner and luncheon menus, each dedicated to a named individual, followed by a full alphabetical index. This is a book for the reader interested in the aesthetics and social rituals of early twentieth-century formal American entertaining, more a manual of presentation technique than of everyday cooking, and it rewards browsing as much as following any single recipe start to finish.

The book proceeds from a preface and general instructions on gelatine and aspic work into a long sequence of appetizer and sandwich recipes (sections 1 to 3), then into an extensive salad section spanning several chapters (sections 4 to 7), followed by cold and hot sauces (sections 7 to 8), fish and poultry entrees (sections 8 to 9), meat dishes largely built from leftovers (section 10), frozen desserts (section 11), cakes (section 12), and finally pastries, cake-pies, sample dinner and luncheon menus, and a closing alphabetical index spanning two sections (sections 13 to 14). Recipes throughout are grouped by ingredient or dish type rather than by course strictly, and many named dishes recur or are cross-referenced to the author's earlier, larger cookbook for supporting techniques.