I’m looking through an 1893 cookbook titled Cooking for Profit, which, as the subtitle explains, is a cookbook “Adapted for the Use of All Who Serve Meals for a Price.” It has menus and recipes for all the sorts of food businesses that were popular in the late 1800s in America, like coffee shops and hotel restaurants. Below are some observations on what appears in the book.

Many of the recipes are for dishes that are still common today, although there are some interesting variations. For example, the coffee recipes include a variation popular at the time, which was the addition of raw egg to the raw coffee. The point of the addition was to clarify the coffee in some way (I don’t quite understand just what that means), but it also apparently “seems to give it [the coffee] a mild taste like the addition of milk.” (page 15)

The book includes a recipe for “Filet a la Chateaubriand,” which is a thick tenderloin steak sandwiched between two thin steaks and then cooked on a grill over a fire. Only the thick steak is served to the diner. The two outside steaks should keep the inner steak moist as it cooks. This dish isn’t unique to this cookbook; it was fairly standard at more expensive restaurants back then.

The economics of the restaurant business shifted with a change from using coal as a fuel source to using gas as a fuel source. A gas stove can be turned on and off quickly while a coal-burning stove has to be left burning as long as the restaurant is open, which means the coal stove gives off lots of excess heat. Therefore the book advises restaurant cooks to keep a large pot, filled with water and some leftover cuts of meat, simmering for a few hours each day to supply cooking stock for the next day. Today that’s a waste of cooking fuel but back then the cook could simply use the excess heat that was there anyway.

Oysters were extremely popular, probably because they were inexpensive and plentiful. The book has pages of recipes for dishes like oyster omelets, fried oysters, and oysters on toast.

Americans loved their meat and were not so into vegetables at all. There are scarcely any vegetable recipes, and most of those are either for different forms of potatoes or for pickled vegetables.

Many of the candy recipes call for gum arabic, which is sap from the acacia tree. I assumed this was an old-fashioned ingredient that is impossible to get today. A quick web search reveals that it’s still widely used, particularly in the beverage industry, although a price hike in 2011 (much of it comes from Sudan, which has some political instability, to say the least) has led food processors to look for substitutes.

The most exciting recipe is the one for Hot American Punch (page 125), mainly because you need to be mixing in ingredients while it’s on fire:

Hot American Punch

Take a punch-bowl; put in a quarter pound of loaf sugar, the juice of a lemon; then add half a pint of brandy and half a pint of Jamaica rum; then set light to this; next make an infusion of green tea, one ounce to a quart and a half water; pour the tea gently into the bowl, and add the rind of half a lemon. The compound must be served flaming, and will be found sufficient for a party of fifteen.