"pennyaline" in ...
> "Naomi Darvell" wrote:
> >
> > People like the Rombauers, who pushed ideas like
> > mixing canned tomato soup and canned pea soup,
> > happened to be dealing with a changed world ...
> > ... That would contribute to a kind of inevitable
> > lowering of standards.
>
> I don't recall JOC advocating anything of this kind.
>
> My JOC wasn't anything like that. I can't imagine
> a book with painstaking hand-drawn illustrations
> of fashioning soufflé collars and slicing chilled scratch
> cookie dough with a length of thread, shilling prefab shortcuts.

Here is the reason for this apparent contradiction, I think. I mentioned
earlier in this thread that this book underwent major changes of style in
the various editions. The 1931 "true first" edition by Irma Louise (von
Starkloff) Rombauer, aged 54 (following a casual recipe collection she made
up in the 1920s for a Unitarian church-sponsored course) is not the first
"commercial" edition but privately printed and family-distributed. My usual
informant, who has one or two of them and is used to answering questions
about this book, reported in a newspaper interview

The author used canned ingredients in the
recipes. When her daughter redid the book
the recipes were from scratch.

That second would be, I assume, the 1936. In 1943 (the first copy in my
family) the book changed radically by merger with another by Rombauer,
_Streamlined Cooking_ (1939). The 1943 is conspicuous in seasoning most of
the meat dishes, even though they were in rich variety, with exactly salt,
pepper, and paprika. (It also is credited with the recipe format seen in
later editions.) A major third revision followed in 1952 with the daughter
named as co-author. For some details here I checked DuSablon (a standard
modern reference on US cookbooks; I don't know how much of relevance is
online, BTW, or how much of the inevitable wholehearted misinformation is
also online). DuSablon is a bit hagiographic on this classic, not
mentioning any limitations.

My usual advisor (a principal collector and dealer in cooking Americana)
says that the 1931 is badly bound and reports receiving, a few years ago, an
urgent order for six copies of the true first edition, for some sort of
Celebrity Foodie Event (CFE). She was obliged to gently clue the organizers
that on short notice, this would cost them three hundred thousand dollars at
current market prices, and the books probably would not look like much.
(The Event made alternative plans.)

-- Max