When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good bride—her highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, “the very foundation of a good table” and “the sovereign” of the true housewife’s kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the century’s best-selling books, The American Woman’s Home.
