365 Luncheon Dishes: A Luncheon Dish for Every Day in the Year

by Marion Harland, Christine Terhune Herrick, Aci Landa (Editor)

A Luncheon Dish for Every Day in the Year, this book is an old collection of recipes, having a suggestion for each day on the calendar. A fun book to try new "old" recipes.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1902

About the author

Mary Virginia Terhune (née Hawes), also known by her penname Marion Harland, was an American author. At age twenty-three she won a $50 prize from the Southern Era periodical for her article on temperance. Encouraged, she published her first novel, Alone, to great acclaim. Despite giving birth to six children and running a household, she never stopped writing, eventually publishing twenty-five novels and three volumes of short stories, as well as numerous books on travel, biography, colonial history, and domestic guidance.

Despite her successful career, Terhune was generally unsupportive of the nascent feminism of her day. Ironically, according to Susan Koppelman in the Old Maids anthology (the source of this biographical note):

She has long been dismissed as an unimportant writer, partly because of her phenomenal output (I think many critics assume that such quantity can't be of high quality) and partly because of the fact that those who cherish the ideals she advocated do not ordinarily go looking for forgotten women writers.

Terhune's three surviving children also became authors.

Reviews

[Edie Walls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of oyster recipes in here. I love the concept, and I did find a few recipes that sounded yummy, but I'm probably going to look them up in modern recipe books instead of using this one. I don't know what a gill of cream is...

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a fan of the organization/layout

[Nicole C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love old cookbooks, not just for the recipes themselves, but as a historical document. This particular cookbook is from 1902, and is a compilation of recipes, arranged by month, one for every day of the year.

The recipes read like paragraphs, and sometimes don't even give exact measurements of ingredients. One is never sure how many people one recipe will serve, and it's expected that one knows how to make a fritter batter or white sauce, for example. Granted, in the time period this was published, those examples were probably in every cook's repertoire and, therefore, instruction would be unnecessary and perhaps insulting.

I also find it interesting that oysters and lobster seem so commonplace in old cookbooks. Perhaps they weren't so cost-prohibitive as they are today?

Some recipes in here I would never attempt, such as any involving animal heads, but there are a few interesting ones I might try, with some minor tweaks for today's dietary restrictions.

[Saleris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mine is the 1902 edition for the Kindle.
Well, this is an interesting "cooks" cookbook. For most of the recipes, there's minimal instruction and in some cases, a list of ingredients with no amounts.
I found it interesting because some of the 1900 versions of recipes are quite different from the 2000 versions.

I don't know if I'd buy this in a bookstore if it was more than $7 (£5).