The Uninvited Guest

The stranger guests at the Sunday table.

A grand dinner for every Sunday of 1915 — and the odd corners of a year spent feeding the family. The pick here, each linking to its menu.

1. A different Sunday dinner every week for a whole year — 52 of them, never repeating. The book's entire promise: a complete, elegant, multi-course dinner for each Sunday, arranged month by month with the seasons, *"on a unique plan"* so a household could work through the year without serving the same dinner twice.Read it: About the Book
2. The recipes are quietly advertisements. This was a promotional cookbook, and the sponsor's brands appear inside the cooking directions: dishes are shortened with Cottolene, pots are scoured with Polly Prim Cleaner, and dishes washed with Gold Dust Washing Powder — a 1915 cookbook doubling as a product catalogue.Read it: Helpful Culinary Hints
3. A gentle-boil myth-buster, 1915 edition. *"Water boiling slowly has the same temperature as when boiling rapidly, and will do just the same amount of work; there is, therefore, no object in wasting fuel to keep water boiling violently."*Read it: Helpful Culinary Hints
4. What "butter the size of an egg" actually meant. The measuring guide translates the old-time unit: two rounded tablespoons — *"the old-time measure of 'butter size of an egg' "* — equals two ounces, or one-fourth of a cup.Read it: How To Measure
5. A pinch, a saltspoon, a dash — defined. *"A pinch means about one-eighth, so does a saltspoon; less means a dash or a few grains."*Read it: How To Measure
6. Larding: sewing fat through your roast. The hints explain threading *"small strips of fat, salt pork or bacon through uncooked meat"* with a larding needle, half-inch stitches, ends left projecting — a technique now nearly vanished from home kitchens.Read it: Helpful Culinary Hints
7. The January dinner was built to pull double duty. The book notes its first menu of the year *"has been prepared rather more elaborately… with the thought that it might serve also as suggestion for a New Year's Dinner."*Read it: Helpful Culinary Hints
8. Frozen fruit as a grand dessert course. Long before the home freezer, these Sunday menus close with frozen apricots and frozen strawberries — desserts that meant hand-cranking ice and salt. — frozen-apricots / frozen-strawberries — B
9. The Edwardian Sunday spread. A single dinner might run from oyster cocktails and crab in timbale cases through a larded roast to a frozen sweet — a portrait of how ambitious a middle-class Sunday table aimed to be in 1915.Read it: About the Book