Centennial Buckeye Cook Book

Introduction and appendixes by Andrew F. Smith

“By any standard the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book was the most important cookbook to have originated in Ohio in the nineteenth century. It included more than three hundred pages of good recipes for jellies and jams, soups and sauces, fruits and vegetables, meats, poultry and fish, and confectionery, cakes and pastry, and many more. It was, however, much more than just a cookbook. Some editions featured information about medicine and the chemistry of food, how to do the laundry, how to make icehouses, hints for the sick and, most unusual, hints for the well. The book was a reflection of home life in Ohio and America before the twentieth century totally swept aside rural American life styles.” —Andrew F. Smith.

The first edition of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book was published in 1876. Between 1876 and 1905, a total of thirty-two editions of the cookbook were published, and more than one million copies sold. The book began as a project of the Marysville, Ohio, First Congregational Church when the women of the church decided to publish a cookbook in order to raise money to build a parsonage. Their effort launched a cookbook that rapidly became one of the most popular publications of nineteenth-century America. This is the first reprint of the original 1876 edition.

Andrew F. Smith teaches culinary history at the New School University in New York.  He is the author of nine books, including Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America's Favorite Food, and he provided the introduction for Livingston and the Tomato (Ohio State University Press 1998).