Candies & Bonbons & How to Make Them

Neil, Marion Harris. Candies & Bonbons & How to Make Them. David McKay: Philadelphia, PA USA 1913. 8vo (195x125mm) illust grey cloth bds vii,[3],11-287,[1]pp; 16 monochrome plates. VG-/- bds lightly worn, cnrs gently bruised

NEIL, Marion Harris ( -1920?)

Candies and Bonbons and how to Make Them

Philadelphia : David McKay, Publisher, 1913. First Edition.

Octavo (195x125mm) illustrated and printed grey cloth boards, vii,[3],[11]-287,[1]pp; 1-18⁸;  sixteen out-of-text halftone engraved plates, including a frontispiece. Bookseller ticket of "Angus & Robertson" Sydney to the front paste-down; boards edges faintly rubbed, corners gently bruised; top edge lightly soiled, faint age-toning to page edges

Neil trained as a cookery teacher at the Glasgow West End School and in London.  She arrived in Philadephia in about 1903 and established the Philadelphia Practical School of Cookery.  Over the next two decades she published numerous cookery books, pamphlets (most famously for Crisco) and newspaper and magazine articles.  She was also the cookery editor for the Ladies' Home Journal, Philadelphia and the managing editor for Table Talk taking over from her contemporary and competitor Sarah Tyson Rorer.

The fifteen chapters cover the basics of candy making, uncooked candies, chocolates, fondant and marzipan making, nougats, glace fruits and nuts, fudges, caramels, taffies, candies and bonbons. There are approximately twenty pages of preliminary instruction including starch molding, sugar preparation, the use of gelatine and 245 recipes for confectionery.

A lovely bright copy of a very practical manual for making confectionery at the beginning of the twentieth century.

§  OCLC records only one holding in Australia, Monash, and only two copies of the UK edition, Monash and RMIT.
§  Driver 752.1; neither in Axford, Cagle & Stafford nor Bitting.