Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cookbook
[Cookbooks]. Lincoln, May Johnson [Bailey]. Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book. What To Do And What Not To Do In Cooking. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884.
8vo; engraved illustrations throughout; original marbled boards, with cloth spine and tips; spine stamped in gilt and blind; covers lightly rubbed; few pages lightly stained (presumably during cooking experiments). In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of a legendary American cookbook, written by culinary wizard and household advisor Mary Johnson Lincoln. The poor quality of the paper seems to indicate that this copy belongs to the scarce first issue. A best-seller, Mrs. Lincoln’s cookbook has been reprinted countless times since 1884; it is now perceived by most housewives—and househusbands—as a standard kitchen companion. Grolier’s 100 American Books 86; Bitting, 28 (citing only the 1896 edition).
Increasingly, modern scholars have begun to acknowledge the vital role that American culinary texts have played in the preservation and dissemination of women’s domestic and cultural history. “Until the 1960s, the vast majority of cookbooks in America were written by women. The publishing of cookbooks was one of the few areas of literary endeavor in which women were taken seriously. Consequently, women expressed their lives and times, not just recipes, in their cookbooks” (HAWH, pp. 128-9). Further, for reasons still not fully appreciated, many early feminists began or supplemented their careers in letters by writing cookbooks: Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Hale, and Catharine Beecher are some of many possible examples. Women’s culinary and domestic instructional texts are now entering the women’s historical canon to such an extent that the most renowned repository for primary and secondary works in American women’s history, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, houses a special Culinary Collection devoted to original cookbooks and recipes in manuscript.
Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book was dedicated to Mrs. Samuel T. Hooper of the Boston Cooking School, “in recognition of her zeal in every good work for the benefit of woman” (dedication page). Mrs. Lincoln’s project was explicitly concerned with a feminist agenda: its author aimed to illuminate the lives of under-educated women, and to raise the general public assessment of the value of women’s work: “To one who from childhood has been trained in all details of housework, learning by observation or by actual experience much that is impossible to receive from the books, the amount of ignorance shown by many women is surprising.” Lincoln goes on to say,
That a person of ordinary intelligence presiding over her household can be satisfied with only a vague conception of the common domestic methods, or that any true woman can see anything degrading in any labor necessary for the highest physical condition of her family, would be incredible if the truth were not daily manifest. Happily, popular opinion now decides that no young lady’s education is complete without a course of training in one or more branches of domestic work...(pp. v-vi).
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