Kentucky receipt book

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

The Kentucky Receipt Book (1903) by Mary Harris Frazer is a large, encyclopedic household cookbook typical of turn-of-the-century American kitchens. It moves from soups and stocks through fish, shellfish, meats and game, sauces, breads, vegetables, eggs and cheese, elaborate molded and aspic dishes, salads and dressings, pies, cakes, dessert sauces, frozen desserts and creams, beverages, preserves and pickles, candies, and finally household hints, home remedies, and toiletries. With over 1,500 anchored food records and only a handful of household and medicinal entries, the book is overwhelmingly a cookbook, though it closes with practical domestic advice typical of the genre. Readers will find both plain family fare, such as soups and vegetable dishes, alongside elaborate entertaining fare like terrapin, aspics, croquettes, and molded desserts, showing the range of a well-equipped Southern household kitchen of the era. The recipes reflect a period when fresh butchering, oyster shipping, home canning, and wine-based cooking were all part of ordinary domestic life. This dossier draws only on the corpus-derived section summaries and catalog metadata, so it presents the book's contents and structure rather than outside biographical or historical claims about the author or the period.

The book is organized as a sequence of culinary categories rather than a strict alphabetical dictionary. It opens with soup stocks and broths (sections 1-2), moves into fish and extensive shellfish, especially oyster, recipes (sections 2-4), then covers meats, game, and poultry (sections 4-6), followed by sauces and breads (sections 6-8), vegetables and eggs (sections 8-10), elaborate molded meat and poultry dishes with aspics and forcemeats (sections 10-11), salads and dressings (sections 12-13), pies and puddings (section 13), cakes and dessert sauces (sections 16-17), frozen desserts and creams (sections 18-19), beverages including coffee, tea, punches, and invalid drinks (section 19), preserves, pickles, and canning (sections 20-21), and finally candies, cereals, household hints, medicinal remedies, and toiletries (section 22). Within categories, recipes are grouped by main ingredient or technique, with headings marking subsections such as FOWL, BREAD, TOAST, VEGETABLES, CATSUP, TO CAN FRUIT, and TO CAN VEGETABLES.