The New Dr. Price Cook Book for use with Dr. Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder, published in 1921 by Royal Baking Powder Co.  (Thanks, Tracy!)  This has a full color cover and black & white interior, and no illustrations inside, it is just crammed with recipes.  While it lacks illustrations or food photos, or any sense of page design, the cover illustration (front and back), combined with a plethora of interesting recipes makes up for it!  It is a bare-bones, straight to the point cookbook with none of those fancy photos or illustrations, or cleaver verbiage to distract you from making your meal.

Half of the book is comprised of various baked goods and desserts (hence the baking powder), and the other half contains soups, main dishes, information on canning, and even… suggestions for invalids! I mean, really, how often does a cookbook even consider the needs for invalids?  No, poor invalids are usually just forgotten… who cares what invalids eat?!  Well, considering this cookbook appears to have hundreds, and hundreds of recipes squeezed into it’s 50 pages, only 7 of them are for invalids. Okay, they tried to be P.C. back in the 1920′s by adding a few pathetic recipes for invalids.  I’ll give them credit for that.

Okay, I know you are extremely curious as to what you would eat if you are an invalid… Barley Water, Aluminized Orange (egg white and orange juice!), Pineapple Juice, Beef Tea, Scraped Beef, Spanish Cream, Gluten Muffins. Apparently that is it, so stop whining and get well so you can have real food that might make you healthier than this crap!  Egg white and orange juice…. nasty!

Aside from the weird invalid recipes, the other recipes are very straight forward with minimal instructions.  They also, for the most part, appear to be some basic and okay recipes.  And while I always thought planked fish was some new yuppie chef creation… nope!  1923, baby!