this Cook Book life

If you have an interest, read today’s article about my cook book store.

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.

CNN reports that “a weak economy has turned cooking into a necessity for many Americans.” BIGResearch, a Worthington, Ohio-based firm that does consumer research, found that about 45% of Americans are dining at home in 2008; (rather than going out) in order to save money. CNN mentions that Borders Group, Inc. and Amazon.com have both experienced double-digit growth in sales of food-related products like cook books, etc.