About the Book
Meatless Cookery (1914) was written for a doctor's patients. Dr. Bishop, a heart specialist, had found from prolonged observation that the food most often at fault in heart trouble and high blood pressure was meat, eggs, fish and meat-stock soups. Maria McIlvaine Gillmore's answer was not a book of substitutes-by-apology but a full cuisine: nut roasts and rissoles, cheese soufflés and fondues, soups of dasheen, okra and chestnut, and vegetable gelatine standing in for calf's-foot jelly.
The chapters are the book's own — twenty-one of them, down to a short one on what to do with the whites of eggs left over from the custards.
A note on this edition, added 4 August 2026. This site was built from a professionally hand-keyed transcript, and that transcript turned out to be incomplete. It had been made to a brief that amounted to “type the recipes”: where a recipe was set as a block of ingredients followed by a method it was transcribed, and where it was set as continuous prose it was passed over. Everything that was not a recipe at all went with it.
Reading the original page scans against the transcript recovered 101 recipes that had never been typed — among them Waldorf Salad, Boiled Asparagus, Mashed Potatoes, Swiss Potatoes, Glazed Sweet Potatoes, Apple Roll, Tomato Eggs and Spanish Sandwiches — together with the whole of the twelve-page Menus section, seventy-six bills of fare of which not one word had been transcribed, and Mrs. Gillmore's preface and Dr. Bishop's introduction. Those are now on this site.
The recovery is not finished. A head-by-head comparison of the scans against the transcript shows roughly a hundred and seventy further recipes, scattered through pages that were otherwise typed, which are still missing, and the food-value charts at the back of the book have not yet been transcribed. Where we cannot yet vouch for a page we would rather say so than quietly present a partial book as a whole one.
This digital edition presents the keyed text of the E. P. Dutton edition together with the material recovered from the page scans, one recipe to a page, arranged in the book's own chapters.