Good Things to Eat and How to Prepare Them

From the Larkin Kitchen-Laboratory in Buffalo, 1907 — the soap-and-premium empire's own book of over two hundred recipes.

Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each one links straight to the page it comes from.

  1. The philosophy of food, from a girl of eight. Asked why she ate, she replied: "There are a lot of little stoves in my stomach in which the fires need to be kept burning, so I will be warm." The book says she "had grasped the whole philosophy of food." Read it in the book →
  2. The recommended kitchen scale is a premium. A scale "is not absolutely needful, but is very useful, and we advise the Columbia Family Scale, which is one of our premiums" — buy the soap, earn the scale. Read it in the book →
  3. The china rule is absolute. "Never use a broken, cracked, or nicked dish on the table" — the one unbendable law in a chapter otherwise all taste and means. Read it in the book →
  4. Kipling summarizes preserving in two words. The Canning and Preserving chapter's epigraph is simply "MUST BE SUGARED." — before sorting all preservation into five sugar-stopped groups. Read it in the book →
  5. The chafing-dish gets a two-thousand-year pedigree. "The chafing-dish comes down to us through a period of at least two thousand years" — dignity for the 1907 supper gadget, under a Shakespeare epigraph. Read it in the book →
  6. Every consommé begins with the company's own jar. Consommé with rice, with sago, with tapioca, with egg noodles — each built on Larkin Extract of Beef, because every recipe is also an advertisement. Read it in the book →
  7. The salad chapter reaches back to Rome. "There is record of the use of salads in Roman times, when many ingredients were mixed together in a mortar" — though "without doubt the simpler the salad the better." Read it in the book →
  8. Milton sets the dinner table. The Dining-Room chapter opens "ON HOSPITABLE THOUGHTS INTENT" — Paradise Lost, pressed into service for table-setting advice from a soap company. Read it in the book →
  9. Tea is brewed by the book. "Use an earthen teapot, freshly boiled water, one teaspoon of the preferred brand of tea to each cup and one spoon for the pot" — the Beverages chapter under Wordsworth's "Drink, pretty creature, drink." Read it in the book →
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Good Things to Eat and How to Prepare Them (1907) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.