Notes and recipes, freshman domestic science, H. Sophie Newcomb memorial college

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This is a 1915 domestic science textbook compiled by Harriet Amelia Boyer for freshman students at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the women's college of Tulane University in New Orleans. Rather than a conventional cookbook meant for a home kitchen, it is a teaching manual that blends recipes with laboratory procedure, health rules, table service instruction, and curriculum planning. Readers will find early sections devoted to kitchen organization, sanitation habits, and invalid cookery for the sick, followed by recipes reflecting the Gulf Coast setting of the school, including turtle soup, crayfish bisque, gumbo, and jambalaya. Later sections move into salads, cakes, candies, and fruit preserves, before concluding with detailed lesson plans and a four-year high school home economics curriculum. The book therefore serves double duty as both a source of period recipes and a record of how domestic science was formally taught to young women in the early twentieth century American South. Modern readers will encounter measurements, temperatures, and instructions typical of the era, alongside pedagogical material such as scoring rubrics for student cooks and monthly curriculum outlines. It offers a window into institutional home economics education as much as into contemporary Louisiana cuisine of the period.

The book is organized into four sections that move from foundational instruction to specific recipes and finally to curriculum design. Section 1 opens with a foreword, definitions, desk organization suggestions, health rules, table setting protocols, and introductory recipes such as biscuits and invalid foods. Section 2 shifts into seafood and entree recipes drawn from Gulf Coast and New Orleans market traditions, including soups, shellfish, and poultry dishes. Section 3 covers salads, cakes, fruit preparations, and candies, then pivots into teaching tools, including a lesson-evaluation score card and a fourth-grade lesson plan, closing with an outline for a four-year high school home economics program. Section 4 presents an extended, month-by-month household management and cooking curriculum spanning multiple years of study, covering kitchen skills, nutrition, home management, and field visits to markets and factories.