Manual for a Happy and Healthy Domestic Life in Mid-19th Century America

Ladies’ Home Companion.

Ladies Indispensable Assistant. Being a Companion for the Sister, Mother and Wife. [Bound with as publisher]: Ladies’ Cooking Assistant and Family Friend: Containing a Select Number of Important Family Recipes.

New York, 1850-51. Item #1267

8vo. 200 x 150 mm., [8 x 5 ¼ inches].  72;  [vii], 8-48;  [i] 122-136 pp.  Bound in publisher’s red embossed linen cloth, decorated spine and medallion on the upper board; some fading to the spine and around the edges of the cloth binding; paper stock foxed with tidemarks in the upper right corner of the text; with faults a good to very good copy.

This copy appears to be the second edition, originally published separately and then as companion volumes.  The two titles are followed by 16 pages of text from another publication in this line which touches on etiquette for ladies and gentlemen, ladies grooming and choice of dressing gowns, taking care of canary birds, and sewing instructions.

Ladies’ Indispensable Assistant is a guide which focuses on family medicine and is entitled the Family Physician.  It includes descriptions of diseases and remedies for their cure.  Croup, Whooping Cough, Rheumatism, Consumption, Inflammatory Fever, Typhus Fever, Scarlet Fever, and Measles are the major aliments that described.  Scores of other sicknesses are discussed in less detail, but each contains a diagnosis and remedy.  Ladies’ Cooking Assistant contains hundreds of cooking recipes including cakes and breads; pies, preserves and jellies; meat, fish, and gravies; and vegetables there is also a section entitled, “Cookery for the Sick”.

Lowenstein, Bibliography of American Cookery Books. 

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Price: $250.00