About the book
Cornmeal muffins instead of an all-wheat loaf. Beans, eggs and cheese to stretch a meal. Fruit in place of elaborate sweets. In 1917, Minnie L. Jamison brought the American wartime food-saving campaign into the home kitchen, in a bulletin issued by the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial College in Greensboro.
This is a historical cookbook about cooking with less, not a long-term food-preservation manual. It covers wheat-saving breads, cornmeal and potato breads, meat-saving meals, simpler desserts that conserve sugar, fats and household substitutions, and fuel-saving ideas such as the fireless cooker.
This illustrated HIPS Books edition is a readable, searchable A4 PDF that keeps Jamison’s wording and quantities. It is a reading edition, not a set of kitchen-tested modern recipes: some entries omit methods or ingredients and some practices are unsafe today. Editorial notes identify these limits; use current, tested guidance for real cooking.
What this edition includes
53 A4 pages. The 1917 historical text, reset in searchable type; five new coloured-pencil-style editorial plates and the original fireless-cooker engraving; a HIPS historical introduction; 40 vocabulary entries for older kitchen terms; five reader guides; clickable contents, PDF bookmarks and a linked recipe finder; separate modern safety notes. New illustrations are editorial, not historical plates.
Inside the book: selected contents
A reading overview, not the complete text.
- Saving wheat: breads, muffins and griddle cakes using cornmeal, potato and other substitutes.
- Saving meat: meals built on beans, eggs, cheese, vegetables and leftovers.
- Saving sugar: fruit dishes and simpler desserts.
- Saving fat: fats, nuts and household substitutions.
- Saving fuel and labour: including the historical fireless cooker.
Key concepts for reading
HIPS editorial explanations of the historical text.
- Yeast cake: compressed fresh yeast, not a cake to eat; the original weight is unspecified.
- Saving: conserving scarce foods for the war effort, not preserving food for storage.
- Fireless cooker: a retained-heat box of the period; its historical construction is not endorsed today.
Before you buy
How is this different from an archive scan?
An archive scan preserves photographed pages. This is a prepared reading edition: reset text and modern reading support, with the historical author’s words kept distinct. The edition details and preview pages above show what is included in this particular book.
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