The art of German cooking and baking

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The Art of German Cooking and Baking is a 1922 household cookbook by Lina Wachtelborn Meier, presented as a revised edition of an earlier work. It contains approximately 1,250 tested recipes organized into 26 chapters, reflecting the German and Austro-Hungarian culinary traditions that shaped German-American home cooking in the early twentieth century. The book moves systematically from soups and meats through poultry, game, fish, and shellfish, then into vegetables, salads, eggs, and a long run of baked goods, desserts, preserves, and beverages, closing with menus and a section devoted to invalid cookery. Recipes are precise for their era, specifying quantities for four to eight or six persons and giving detailed step-by-step instructions for techniques such as larding, braising, making aspic, and testing candy syrups by cold water trials. The scope is broad enough to serve as both a daily reference and an occasional showpiece manual, with elaborate dishes like mock-turtle soup, stuffed game birds, and multi-layered tarts alongside everyday potato and cabbage preparations. For modern readers, it offers a detailed window into formal German-American domestic cookery, meat economy practices, and home preservation methods of the period, all organized with the practical clarity of a working kitchen manual rather than a literary cookbook.

The book is organized into 26 numbered chapters, each covering a distinct category of cookery, beginning with soups (section 1-2) and proceeding through beef, veal, mutton and lamb, pork, poultry and game birds, game, fish, shellfish and head-cheese, dressings and gravies, potatoes and vegetables, salads, eggs, omelets and pies, sauces and desserts, frozen desserts and beverages, breads and cakes, cookies and candies, preserves, and finally sandwiches, menus, and invalid cookery (sections 1 through 18). Each chapter numbers its recipes sequentially (for example Chapter 3 Nos. 1-42 for veal, Chapter 6 Nos. 1-56 for poultry and game birds, as shown in section 20's index). The front matter includes a preface describing the author's revisions and a table of reliable weights and measures (section 1). The book concludes with a comprehensive index, miscellaneous cooking and carving instructions, and memoranda pages (section 20). Note that sections 13 and 19 were not included in the provided material, so there are gaps in the continuous chapter sequence as presented here.