The Kitchen; or, Every-day Cookery, Containing Many Useful Practical Directions, Recipes, etc. with Numerous Wood Engravings Showing How to Carve, and the Proper Mode of Sending Dishes to Table. A Companion Volume to Rand, McNally & Co.'s Pocket Encyclopedia. [Everyday]

Chicago: Rand, McNally & Company, 1885. Duodecimo (14.25 x 11 cm), 104, [2] pages. Advertisements. Illustrated. FIRST EDITION. More than three hundred short recipes, with a stark emphasis on meat, including game, and how to serve it. The Kitchen was foremost an advertising vehicle for Rand, McNally, showing off to those who kept books in their homes the utilitarian pleasures of modern engraving and electrotypography, available at an affordable price. Bitting attributes the compilation, without explanation, to Mrs. Orange Judd, possibly as a result of consulting Rand, McNally records of one sort or another. Harriet Stewart Judd (1823-1907) might well have sought editorial work in Chicago after assuming a teaching post at Rockford Female Seminary, during the years that her husband was establishing his own Chicago publishing house. Orange Judd (1822-1892) was a peripatetic chemist, businessman, and agricultural journalist, who had served as editor of American Agriculturist as well as agricultural editor for the New York Times. Orange Judd and Company was known for, among other publications, the weekly illustrated magazine Hearth and Home. Small closed tear to the final leaf. Bound in red-lettered, tan faux-alligator wrappers; edgeworn and worn at the top of the spine. Near very good. [OCLC locates fifteen copies; Bitting, page 251; Brown 698; not in Cagle].