Cookbooks: Diet Cookbooks

Diet regimens for weight loss have been promulgated in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. William Banting, an obese English undertaker who adopted a diet severely limiting foods containing “starch and saccharine matter” (i.e., carbohydrates), lost fifty pounds; in 1863 he popularized the diet in a pamphlet titled “Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.” Its four editions were widely circulated, especially in the United States, during the late nineteenth century. While it was not a cookbook, the pamphlet did give menus specifying how many ounces of each food to eat.