Two hundred tested recipes

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

"Two Hundred Tested Recipes" is a compact 1920 community cookbook compiled by the Literature and Library Extension Department of the Woman's Club of Oxford, North Carolina. Organized across three sections, it moves from everyday breads, cereals, soups, fish, meats, and salads through an extensive run of desserts and pastries, and finally into cookies, frozen desserts, eggs and cheese, and pickles and sauces. The collection reflects the practical, thrifty style of early twentieth-century American home cooking, with recipes for economical dishes like scrapple and jellied beef alongside more festive fare such as charlottes, fruit cakes, and homemade ice creams. Gelatin desserts appear frequently, and the book even incorporates advertisements for Knox Gelatine directly alongside its recipes, a reminder that club cookbooks of this era often blended community contributions with commercial sponsorship. With 176 anchored food records, this is a working kitchen reference rather than a literary text, offering a window into what a middle-class Southern household kitchen prepared and valued a century ago. Modern readers will find both familiar staples and dishes that have faded from common use, making it a useful artifact for understanding regional and period foodways as much as a source of recipes to actually cook today.

The book is organized into three mechanically gated sections that together move through a logical meal-and-course progression. Section 1 opens with bread and cereal recipes, then continues into soups, fish and oysters, meat dishes, and salads. Section 2 shifts into desserts and pastry, covering gelatin desserts, custards, puddings, pies, and a wide range of cakes. Section 3 concludes with cookies, frozen desserts, eggs and cheese dishes, and pickles and sauces, ending with confections and sample menus. The headings suggest a fairly conventional household cookbook arrangement by course and dish type, typical of club-compiled recipe collections of the period.