About the Book
Lillian A. Sackman's The Book of a Thousand Menus (Grant Publications, New York, 1927) is not a cookbook. It is a book of days: sixty-seven weeks of complete menus, breakfast, lunch and dinner, printed one week after another so that a housekeeper could open it and simply cook.
The twelve menu chapters are a grid — meatless or with meat, summer or winter, balanced or for gaining weight or for reducing — five weeks in each. Then come nine holiday dinners, six weeks of menus costed out to the calorie with the vitamins named beside every dish, and a closing chapter of cooking hints and recipes.
The science in it belongs to 1927. Calories were new enough that Sackman stops to define one. The vitamins then known were A, B and C, and the last chapter marks each dish with the letters it was believed to carry. The eighteen elements she lists as necessary to the body include arsenic. Her rules — be moderate, eat simply, sip iced drinks slowly, use lemon juice instead of vinegar — are the period's health writing, argued chapter by chapter and again in a note at the end of nearly every Sunday.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages. The printed reading order was rebuilt from the page geometry — three days in every seven had been lost as running heads — and the calorie tables were reassembled column by column, dish, calories and vitamins, against the scans.