About the Book
Good Housekeeping's Cook Book was published for the magazine by the Phelps Publishing Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. It is a small, flat book, made to lie open on a table without taking up much room — and made, unusually, to be added to: a blank leaf headed MEMORANDA faces every page of recipes.
The magazine was equally proud of how the recipes got in. Each one came from a cook who had made it repeatedly; each was then tested by committees drawn from the magazine's own subscribers; and each was tested a third time by the New England School of Cookery before it was set in type. Fannie Merritt Farmer is among the contributors.
The title leaf is missing from the copy that was scanned, so the year of this printing is still being established from external records before publication. What the book itself can tell us is that its owner was cooking out of it by September 1914, because she dated one of her own additions.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked against the scans.