Jack Wilbur's Pictures

The title page credits illustrations by Jack Wilbur, and five leaves of this book are given over entirely to a picture and its caption. Set side by side they are the whole book in miniature — half American food history, half advertisement, and the reader is never told where one stops.

The plates themselves are not reproduced here. The captions below are the book's own words, in the order they fall.

1. “The Colonial Kitchen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art”
   Facing the Colonial Breakfasts panel. The Metropolitan had opened its American Wing period rooms in 1924, and a museum kitchen was a fashionable thing to have seen.
2. “Company Luncheon — Karo Fruit Cocktail the first course”
   Facing the luncheon menus: a photograph of a laid table, and of a product.
3. “Vegetable Dinner with Karo Orangeade”
   Facing the inexpensive dinners.
4. “The Husking Bee”
   Set among the dinner recipes — the corn-husking party, the sociable end of the harvest that the prologue keeps returning to.
5. “Stains are easily removed from Linit-laundered napery”
   Opening the chapter on table linen. Linit was the company's laundry starch, made from the same corn.

Two further product photographs are set into the text pages rather than given leaves of their own: waffles made with Mazola, and the materials laid out for Spanish Casserole beside a package of Argo.