Selection and preparation of food

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

Selection and Preparation of Food is a 1907 home economics laboratory manual by Isabel Bevier, structured as a sequence of numbered experiments rather than a conventional recipe collection. It guides students through the scientific principles behind cooking, beginning with kitchen setup, equipment, fuel, measurement, and temperature standards before moving into water, protein foods, meats, carbohydrates, and bread. Each topic is treated as an experiment demonstrating how heat, chemistry, and technique affect food, with recipes serving as practical applications of the principles under study. The book reflects an educational approach to cookery, aimed at training students in the reasoning behind food preparation rather than simply providing dishes to follow. Readers today will find a text that blends laboratory rigor with domestic instruction, covering everything from egg coagulation and milk composition to canning, pickling, yeast behavior, and meal service. It closes with sections on meal planning, judging finished meals for quality and cost, and an extensive index. This is a valuable window into early twentieth-century scientific home economics education, useful for understanding how cooking was taught as an applied science in institutional or classroom settings of the period.

The book is organized as a laboratory course divided into sequential experiments grouped by food category. Section 1 opens with front matter, kitchen and equipment basics, water-based preparations, and an extensive treatment of protein foods (milk, eggs, cheese). Section 2 continues with meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, fats, and food preservation techniques. Section 3 addresses canning, pickling, and jelly-making before turning to carbohydrates, starches, sugars, and leavened preparations such as cakes and breads. Section 4 concludes with yeast science, bread-making methods, meal planning, judging of meals, and a full index. Numbered experiments (for example Experiment 57 through 61 in section 2) structure the content, with recipes embedded as illustrations of the principles being taught.