At the start of World War I, few American households owned more than one or two cookbooks and these were not central to most kitchen activity. The Boston area still retained an importance in instructional food writing inherited from the early days of the New England Kitchen and the Boston Cooking School. The best-known American cookbook was The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) by Fannie Farmer, who had died in 1915. Its very fine predecessor and rival, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (1884) by Mary J. Lincoln, went out of print after 1919. Revisions of the Farmer book were overseen until 1930 by her sister, Cora Perkins, and thereafter by Perkins’s daughter-in-law, Wilma Lord Perkins. A few other veterans of the nineteenth-century New England scientific cookery movement—notably Janet McKenzie Hill, the longtime editor of The Boston Cooking School Magazine, and Alice Bradley, Farmer’s successor as the principal of Miss Farmer’s Cooking School—continued to publish widely for several decades, but their books seldom aimed for universal manual status or stressed claims of scientific method. Despite the huge prestige of dietetics at this time, too much emphasis on the subject was coming to mark a cookbook as stuffy and dated. By the early 1940s, even Wilma Lord Perkins was trying to make The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book match current preferences with dashes of added warmth, personality, and attention to new products or fashions.
