About the Book
The Bride's Cook Book was not sold. It was given away: “presented free to the Bride and Groom with the compliments of the ADVERTISERS therein, who make such presentation possible.” Pacific Coast Publishing Co. of San Francisco printed it; every shop in it is in Portland, Oregon, which is where the copies went.
So half of this book is advertising, and it is kept here — all thirty-four display pages, gathered into a section of their own so they do not stand between a cook and a recipe. They are the best record in the book of what a 1918 bride was being sold: a Blue Bird electric clothes washer so that “no self-respecting husband” need ask her to scrub, a Leonard Hi-Oven that takes the ache out of bake, wedding photographs at ten per cent off on presentation of this very page, mattresses, tailoring, jewellery and a face cream guaranteed free of bismuth, zinc and lead.
The cookery is real and was vetted: a letter from the Federal Food Commissioner for California, dated July 1918, certifies that the recipes were examined by the Home Economics Department of the United States Food Administration — and the publishers note that they have since been “changed back to a Pre-War basis.” The wheat-saving substitutes have gone; the corn syrup and the butter substitutes have not.
Recipes contributed by advertisers — Fleischmann's yeast breads, the two flour mills, Ghirardelli's Brown Stone Front Cake, Blanchard Evaporated Eggs and the whole honey department from Virgil Sires' bee farms at Yakima — are left where the book put them, among the cookery, because that is what they are and the printed Table of Contents lists them so.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked against the scans.