219 New Ways to a Man's Heart by Phoebe Dane

I intended to read Agnes Grey tonight, but one thing ran late and then this person called with GREAT news, so I spent time excitedly squealing with them on the phone, and I realized there was no way I could give poor Anne Brontë the attention she deserved. So I searched my bookshelves for something short that I hadn't yet read and finally came up with this thin, small cookbook that my mother's mother had, which I took with me when we were cleaning out her house after she died. The woman kept every piece of kitchen and homemaking advice she ever laid her eyes on. She even clipped the little advice columns for housewives out of the local paper. And they ran some of the same advice two, three, or even four times!

So it is no surprise, therefore, that this ad-filled "staple for the American housewife" (originally printed in 1929?) was one of the many things she left behind. I thought the title was amusing, so I took it to peruse when I had the time.

"This is a book for women who are already good enough cooks to make ordinary things, but who want to become better; who want to produce the sort of food that makes men hurry home from the office, and that children remember longingly years afterward."

This is a book that will tell you how to be a good wife by making bread and curing your husband's (metaphorical?) impotency with yeast!

There are 219 recipes in this second edition of Dane's original booklet (which contained 161 recipes). It sold for 10 cents and was so popular that they later came out with a third edition with 333 recipes. (The bigger the book, the more ad space!) And these are pretty much all the recipes you will every need to survive on a typical, American diet. There's even a recipe for Cheetos in here! Just kidding. There's a recipe for cheese sticks, but they're more like stick-shaped cheese biscuits, from what I can tell. I was most excited to see the recipe for île flottante!

I have a few questions that arose in reading this, though: What is a timbale? Who the hell broils bananas wrapped in bacon? And oh dear god, WHY THIS?:

Yes, you will indeed be able to watch your child increase in weight if you add corn syrup to everything they eat and drink... Shovel that Karo into their mouths as often as possible! Don't worry about what the effects will be 80 years later! Make your children plump and sweet like the children of royalty!

I shouldn't be so mean. It was a different time back then. So I'll judge this volume as a cookbook only. Some of the instructions were a bit vague or confusing. (For instance, does measuring this the same as that and that refer to the thats combined or just one of the thats?) But the breadth was impressive for a promotional item.

~6/10~