If one spends time with this delightful, little book, he will soon notice that interest moved from the kitchen into the dining room. From preparing food for the family to serving and entertaining guests, and from seeking the bare necessities to desiring the finer things in life.The Civil War had ended only a generation before, and in only a few more years the twentieth century and a definite "new age" would arrive. It had been only a few years since the first telephone call, and also a few years since the first automobile was offered for sale to the public. The whole American continent was on the move. Americans were looking for the better things in life, so a large silver manufacturing company found it worthwhile to publish a lovely cookbook with some 100 recipes based only on the chafing dish cookery.An attempt was made to put the chafing dish into a historical and cultural context by tracing its history from the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the Middle Ages, into the Age of Discovery, and finally bringing it to the New World in 1720. According to the Introduction, "The colonists having overcome the difficulties incidental upon the making of a new country, began to appreciate and to desire the luxuries and adornments of refined living."After reassuring the reader that the sincerest expression of hospitality is to serve with chafing dishes, a long list of useful and not-so-useful recipes is given. Some of them are still as excellent today a they were when the book was written. Among those worth trying are the ones we have translated for the modern cook - Crab Meat a la Newburgh (p. 52), Liver a la Suisse (p. 158), and Rum Omelette(p. 129).It is interesting to note that this little book attempts to give accurate measurements and accurate timings, explaining the conditions under which the dishes were prepared in the company's testing facilities, restaurant-type dishes, such as those recipes which use lobster, crab, oysters and steak, the author also includes wholesome, but very simple dishes such as Frankfurter and Cabbage (p. 158), Welsh Rarebit (p. 178) and Smoked Pigs Jowl (p.97).

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come. Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.