this Cook Book life

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.

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.