Magnet users cook book

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

The Magnet Users Cook Book is a 1920 promotional cookbook published by the Petrie Manufacturing Company, makers of Magnet cream separators and gasoline engines. Now in its ninth edition, it is a substantial community-sourced collection of recipes contributed by home cooks, organized as a general household cookbook covering everything from soups and fish to cakes, candies, preserves, and household hints. The book blends practical culinary instruction, including explanations of basic cooking terms, weights and measures, and time tables for roasting, baking, and preserving, with frequent advertising testimonials for Magnet dairy equipment woven directly into the recipe pages. Its subject matter reflects Canadian domestic cooking of the era, with contributions credited to home cooks across Canada. Beyond recipes, the book includes sections on invalid cookery, sandwich making, food drying and canning, candy making, and a lengthy household guide to the many uses of salt, narrated in part through the folksy voice of 'Aunt Samanthy.' For the modern reader, this is as much an artifact of early twentieth-century marketing and domestic economy as it is a functional cookbook, offering a window into how manufacturers used community recipe collection to build customer loyalty and brand trust in rural and small-town households.

The book proceeds from front matter and cooking fundamentals (section 1) through savory categories like soups, fish, salads, meats, poultry, and vegetables (sections 1 to 2), then into pastry, puddings, and frozen desserts (sections 3 to 4), an extensive run of cake, cookie, and confection recipes (sections 4 to 6), and finally practical household chapters covering leftovers, sandwiches, invalid dishes, preserving, pickling, candy making, and salt uses (sections 7 to 9). The final section closes with a household remedies guide and an index. Throughout, recipe content is interrupted regularly by testimonials for Magnet cream separators and gasoline engines, a structural quirk tied to the book's origin as a manufacturer's promotional publication.