Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus

Description

Rufus Estes gathered several hundred practical recipes here — meats, game, fowl and fish, along with puddings, pastries and desserts — drawn from years of cooking in private railroad car service and in Chicago. He opens not with the kitchen but with himself: a short sketch of his life, beginning in Tennessee, where he was born into slavery, and following his rise to a chef trusted with feeding the wealthy on the move. A foreword sets out his terms plainly, admitting the collection’s imperfections while insisting on quality and on service.

What survives is a working record of American cooking as it was actually done in 1911 — the cuts, the game birds, the puddings, the assumption that a cook could handle a whole fish or a whole fowl. It also preserves one man’s account of how he got there.