this Cook Book life

The Pioneer Lady, Ree Drummond; made famous with her blog and cookbook: The Pioneer Woman Cooks : Recipes From An Accidental Country Girl premiers on the Food Channel today.

The University of Kentucky Press has re-issued Jennie Benedict’s Blue Ribbon Cook Book. The recipe for her famous Benedictine spread, conspicuously absent from previous editions, appears in the re-issue.

Susan Reigler, former Louisville Courier-Journal restaurant critic and author of the Compass American Guide to Kentucky and Adventures in Dining: Kentucky Bourbon Country has contributed a new introduction.

According to John Egerton,

Jennie C. Benedict was a renowned Louisville caterer and cafe
owner from 1898 to 1925. Miss Benedict pioneered in gas-stove
cooking and was a creator as well as replicator of classic dishes.
Benedictine spread was one of her contributions. The recipes in
this collector’s dream of a cookbook are a blend of Southern and
cosmopolitan, from spoonbread and sugar pie to lamb chops.

J.P. Morton & Company (of Louisville) published Miss Benedict’s autobiography, The Road To Dream Acre in 1938.

Today, I revised and expanded the publishing history of the Joy of Cooking page on the store’s website.

Dr. Brian Wansink, of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, is the author of a new research study on the Joy of Cooking.
The study involved comparing 18 recipes that have survived the various editions of Joy. 1936, 1946, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1997 and 2006 were the editions used in the study.

Researchers documented the serving size and caloric in each version of the 18 recipes. They found that 17 of the recipes underwent changes that mirrored America’s obestiy epidemic.

Dr. Wasink comments, “What we think is a normal serving size has increased dramatically over the last 70 years … as has what we demand in terms of fat and sugar in a recipe.”

“According to the study, in 1936, the average number of calories in each recipe was 261. The most recent recipes average 384 calories, an increase of 60 percent. If you were to compare just the recipe for sugar cookies, you would find an 142 percent increase in the number of calories from the 1936 recipe to today’s recipe.

Although I’m off today, I worked on some auction listings; including one for the Hunter Sifter Cook Book.
The Hunter Sifter Cook Book contains advertisments for a number of Cincinnati businesses.
Several Hunter Sifter M-f-g Co. products are advertised: the Sifter, Cyclone Beater, and Safety Hollow Ware.
Naturally, I found the Hunter Sifter Co. products: Hunter Sifter, Cyclone Egg Beater and Safety Hollow Ware in various forms on the cook book’s recommended list of Kitchen Utensils. And commonplace items: kitchen table and chairs, can opener, nutmeg grater, potato slicer, waffle iron. Other items listed, puzzled me:

• candlesticks
• ash bucket
• coal hod
• hammer
• hatchet
• 3 iron kettles
• lantern
• match box
• 2 iron spoons
• meat saw
• mustard pot
• rubber window cleaner
• tin pails
• wirescreens (assorted sizes)
• sugar box
• salt box
• stepladder
• tin cake box
• wash keeler
• wooden buckets

After further consideration, the items made sense.
A meat saw cuts up a carcass. A pail or bucket carries water or milk from its source to the kitchen. But for a “sugar box,” sugar hardens into a rock in the moist environment of a kitchen, or worse, becomes home, sweet home to a family of worms. Stainless steel and plastic had not yet been invented, so wooden, iron, and steel implements held, chopped, mixed, heated, transported, and safeguarded ingredients. Mousetrap made the list.

Read about the lnglenook Cook Book.

• 1899 | Brethren, a religious publishing house in Elgin, Illinois, publishes the first issue of the weekly called The Inglenook. A one-year subscription for the magazine that embodied “material and spiritual progress,” cost “one dollar per annum, in advance.” Articles submitted for the publication were intended to be “short, of general interest, and nothing of a love story character or with either cruelty of killing will be considered.”
• 1901 | Brethren House first publishes the Inglenook Cook Book. The recipes were gathered from Sisters of the Brethren Church, Subscribers and Friends of the Inglenook Magazine. The book was among the earliest English-language Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbooks published in America).

Inglenook Cook Book 12th ed, 1908

Inglenook Cook Book 1911

• 1913 | Inglenook Magazine ceases publication.
• 1942 | Brethren publishes a sequel under the same title, Inglenook Cookbook. The new book contains more modern recipes collected from 4000 women.

Grandaughter's Inglenook Cookbook 1948

Grandaughter's Inglenook Cookbook 1948

• 1958 | Harper & Brothers imprint of the 1942 Inglenook Cook Book published under the title: Grandaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook.
• 1970 | The Brethren Press reprints the 1911 edition of The Inglenook Cook Book.
• 1976 | The Brethren Press reprints Grandaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook.