The Metropolitan Cook Book

A life insurance company teaching its policyholders to eat: the Metropolitan's own cookbook, given away from the tower on Madison Square.

About the Book

1918Published
Metropolitan Life Insurance CompanyAuthor
271Recipes

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company ran one of the largest public health campaigns in America — visiting nurses, pamphlets on hygiene and diet, all of it free to policyholders and all of it in the company's commercial interest, since a healthier policyholder lives longer.

This cookbook is part of that campaign. Its stated aim is to help the housewife with “her everlasting question, ‘What shall I have for dinner tonight?’”, and it opens not with recipes but with The Food We Eat, a plain account of what food is for.

The company's mark — the tower at Madison Square with its beacon, “the light that never fails” — is printed on the back cover.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1918 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of The Metropolitan Cook Book (1918) 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.