About the Book
The Larkin Company of Buffalo sold soap by mail and gave away furniture: buy enough Larkin product and the premiums arrived, a chair or a desk at a time. At its height it was one of the largest mail-order businesses in America, and its factories welcomed thirty thousand visitors a year.
This book was compiled for Larkin customers by the company's Kitchen-Laboratory Department — a fourth edition, revised, in 1907. Its opening essay on The Value of Food is pitched at exactly the level the period liked: a little girl explains that she eats because “there are a lot of little stoves in my stomach.”
The 1907 date matters. The Pure Food and Drugs Act had passed in June 1906, and the book is careful to print its government serial number as proof of the guarantee.