BEFORE HEALTH FOOD WAS FASHIONABLE

Colcord, Anna L. (1864–1950)

A Friend in the Kitchen; Or, What to Cook and How to Cook It [First Australian Edition]

Melbourne, Victoria: Echo Publishing Co., Limited, 1898. First Australian Edition.

BEFORE HEALTH FOOD BECAME AN INDUSTRY, THIS LITTLE COOKBOOK WAS TEACHING FAMILIES TO EAT DIFFERENTLY.

THE KITCHEN AS MEDICINE.
Anna L. Colcord’s A Friend in the Kitchen combines approximately 400 recipes with an unusually broad program of household nutrition: healthful cookery, canning, weekly menus, food combinations, infant feeding, dishes for the sick, wholesome drinks, digestion, nutritive values, and kitchen measures.

The recipes emphasize grains, fruits, vegetables, simple preparation, and economical household cooking, placing the book within the late nineteenth-century movement toward dietary reform. Colcord explains that her object was to provide plain directions for food that was simple, economical, wholesome, nutritious, palatable, and varied. Later editions would make the book more explicitly vegetarian.

AN AMERICAN COOKBOOK REMADE IN AUSTRALIA.
The bibliographical story is particularly interesting. Colcord had published an earlier American version, but while living in Australia she substantially prepared the work for its Australian audience. This 1898 Melbourne issue is recognized as the first Australian edition and predates the American edition of this expanded form published the following year.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS: Publisher’s dark cloth over boards, front cover decoratively stamped in silver with title, subtitle, author’s name, ruled title panel, and a vignette of a woman working in a kitchen. Patterned floral endpapers. Illustrated frontispiece depicting a woman at a kitchen range, captioned How Is It Made?—‘A Friend in the Kitchen’ Will Tell. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white drawings, diagrams, food illustrations, decorative advertisements, and other instructional material. Title page states approximately 400 tested recipes and identifies Echo Publishing Co., Limited, 343 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1898. Small octavo, approximately 7 inches tall; 128 pages with index.

CONDITION: The binding remains firm. Text is clean with light, even age-toning. Moderate shelf-handling wear.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE — REFORMING THE VICTORIAN TABLE—FOOD, HEALTH, AND BELIEF.
 A Friend in the Kitchen belongs to a larger nineteenth-century movement that connected diet with health, domestic efficiency, and moral well-being. Colcord and her husband were Seventh-day Adventists, and the Melbourne publisher, Echo Publishing Company, was an Adventist enterprise. The church’s publishing program combined religious literature with an important parallel interest in healthful living.

The 1898 edition is especially revealing because the dietary program was still evolving. According to Monash University’s Sandy Michell Cookbook Collection, this first Australian edition retains a chapter of meat recipes; in later editions that material was replaced by recipes for meat substitutes as the book became more explicitly vegetarian.

AN AUSTRALIAN BESTSELLER.
This was not merely an obscure denominational cookbook. Contemporary evidence shows considerable demand. In September 1898 the Union Conference Record reported that no Echo publication had sold so rapidly and that almost all 10,000 copies of the first edition had been sold within its first three months. Echo’s successor, Signs Publishing Company, still identifies A Friend in the Kitchen as an Australian bestseller in the history of the firm.

SUBJECTS: Anna L. Colcord, Australian Cookery, Vegetarianism, Health Food, Seventh-day Adventists, Echo Publishing Company, Melbourne, Domestic Cookery, Nutrition, Food Reform, Victorian Cooking, Women's Domestic Writing, Cookbooks, Culinary History, Vegetarian Cookery, Health and Nutrition, Domestic Economy, Australian Cookbooks, Dietary Reform.

Item #22362

Price: $75.00