The best reason to reopen an old book is the thing you can't believe is in it. These are the entries that made us stop and read them aloud to whoever was nearby.
Layers of inch-long macaroni and 'grated cheese sprinkled very liberally,' baked with a cup of cream. The 20th Century Home Cook Book prints eight macaroni recipes, including one steamed in a mould and served as a vegetable course.
'Hamburg Steak: is made of round, chopped or grated very fine, then season with pepper, salt and grated onion. Fry in hot fat.' That is the entire recipe — a hamburger patty a few years before anyone in print put it in a bun.
'Beer of Sulphuric Acid' combines dilute sulphuric acid with orange-peel syrup, and the book cheerfully calls the result 'entirely harmless, even if taken in considerable quantities.' It is not. The past is a foreign country with different beverages.
Recipes in Cooking in Old Créole Days call for 'butter the size of an egg' (about 4 tablespoons), 'the size of a walnut' (2 tablespoons) and 'the size of a hazelnut' (a teaspoon) — alongside gills, wineglassfuls, saltspoons and teacups. Our converter decodes the whole 1904 system.
The Epicurean is the great leak of nineteenth-century American fine dining: Delmonico's complete kitchen practice, banquet menus, ice-sculpture diagrams and turtle-soup protocol, set down by the chef himself.
Artemas Ward's encyclopedia of everything a grocer could sell files opossum between the onions and the oranges: 'about the size of a cat,' best 'roasted or baked and served with sweet potatoes (roasted around it) and corn bread.'
'Uncle Tony's Recipe for Cooking 'Possum' has you dress it 'jist like a little pig,' hang it in a tree two or three nights, then roast it flat on a bed of sweet potato slices. Printed as ordinary weeknight instruction in 1906.
A dish for every day of the year, gathered from every nation the Edwardians could spell. Our calendar serves today's — or any date you pick.
Ranhofer's instructions are entirely practical: dry the tail into a fan, wire the neck upright, roast the bird, then rebuild it in its own plumage on a carved rice pedestal. The peacock also appears in Delmonico's market list marked “in season” all twelve months of the year.
Artemas Ward catalogued everything that could cross a grocer's counter — including what came in uninvited. The entry sits among the staples with the same straight face the book gives to coffee and cheese, and resolves into one line of advice that has not been improved on since.