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Category: Cookbooks and Food

Photograph of Ruth Wakefield's Toll House cookbooks. One cookbook is open on a book cradle and the other cookbooks are upright surrounding it. In front is a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a bag of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate morsels.

Ruth Wakefield and Her Chocolate Crunch Cookie

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

Prior to 1930’s, the chocolate chip cookie, we know and love today, did not exist. The Library of Congress has a copy of Ruth Wakefield’s 1938 “Toll House Tried and True Recipes” (New York, M. Barrows and Company) that contains what food historians consider the first published chocolate chip cookie recipe.

An illustrated heading that reads Menu Thanksgiving Day. On one side is a woman in an apron and bonnet holding a dish of warm food and on the other are shafts of wheat. Below is heading reads “So gladly we welcome the happy day. That comes when the summer is over. When the scattered friends we love so well. Round the home hearth meet once more. This drawing is from the 1903 Woman’s Favorite Cook Book.

Fuel for the Festivities: The Thanksgiving Breakfasts of Yesteryear

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

The quintessentially American holiday, Thanksgiving evokes images of vast dinner spreads, centered on turkey, and as we cook and bake, prepare and labor on these elaborate feasts, who has time to think about breakfast? Well, some cook book authors in the 1900s didn’t forget breakfast when they shared their Thanksgiving day menus.

Photograph inside a factory with bottle and boxes of catsup being inspected by working. Photo take circa 1920

Playing Ketchup: A Condiment and the Pure Food Movement

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

Today, our beloved bottles of ketchup are consistent and shelf-stable thanks to the work of Katherine and Arvill Bitting who examined over 1,600 bottles of ketchup, visited 40 canneries producing tomato pulp, and toured 20 ketchup factories to come up with a method to make a safe and preservative-free ketchup.