Temperance Cook Book. Written by Mrs. Mary G. Smith, for the Benefit of all Housekeepers

San Jose, Cal: Mercury Book and Job Printing House, 1887. Small quarto (22 x 15 cm.), [4], [1]-261. Advertisements printed on pink paper; and two additional advertisements printed on pink paper and bound in with the text; there is a two-page advertisement for The San Jose Mercury. Stated "Second Edition"; first thus (see below). Glozer claims this is the second edition, printed the same year as the first, and with the same pagination. However, we have found no records of copies of the San Jose imprint of any date not carrying the "Second Edition" statement on the title page. However, the author published an earlier work under the same title in Wellington, Ohio in 1877. The Wellington book contained 247 pages and is unlikely to contain the Mexican recipes referenced below, but we have not been able to compare copies directly. In the preface, Smith hints that it is a separate work, "with this view, I bring this my second volume before the public..." (page [3]). This cataloguer thinks that this San Jose publication is the earliest for the title in California with notable revisions, and therefore, first thus. We've found little about the author, and so refer to her own words, "A Temperance Cook Book is one of the great necessities of the age. There should be nothing in our eatables to awaken the appetite of the reformed, and we certainly want nothing to cultivate a taste for intoxicating drinks in the young... Having had years of experience in cooking, I feel competent to offer this book as the long-needed help to housekeepers. There are many valuable recipes in it, which I have selected and tried with good results" (Preface). The recipes are in narrative form, and are quite detailed. There are two recipes of Hispanic inclination, one for "Spanish buns - Nice with Coffee" and one for "Chili Colorad [sic]...a favorite dish with all people on the Pacific Coast" (Encarnacion's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California). Mostly internally clean and sound. Hinges starting, some light soiling to endpapers. Publisher's brown cloth, blind-ruled and gilt-titled. Edges rubbed and with some moderate soiling. Still a near very good copy of a very scarce book. [OCLC locates four copies (and four copies of the 1877 Wellington, Ohio publication); Bitting 440; Cagle 718 "no earlier edition is known"; not in Brown or Cook; Glozer 297].