The Elm City Free Kindergarten Receipt Book. Compiled by Mrs. Mary Twining Gridley, with the assistance of the Board of Officers and friends

[New Haven, Conn.]: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1909. Small octavo (18 x 11 cm.), xi, 102, [xxviii] pages. Advertisements. Date of publication from prefatory note. Errata slip laid-in. Evident FIRST EDITION. A compact school community cookbook with nearly three hundred recipes, the majority of them attributed. Notable among them: Cucumber Soup, Creamed Sardines, Fig Sandwiches, Cymling, Cabbage Pudding, Lemon Wafers, Belgrader Brod (i.e., Brot), Kum Baba Cake, Nanepashemet Fruit Cake, Rice and Apple Pudding, Current Meringue Pie, Yellow Tomato Preserve, Pieplant Marmalade. ~ The Elm City Free Kindergarten Association organized and supervised nondenominational kindergartens in spaces made available by arrangement with churches and civic halls. Their mission was not only to provide instruction for small children but also to permit teachers in training to acquire experience before establishing schools of their own. The first opened in the early 1890s, in rooms let by Welcome Hall Settlement on Oak Street, which operated under the auspices of the Congregationalist Church of the Redeemer. A second followed, on Lloyd Street in Fair Haven, and by the turn of the century a third also, in Trinity on the Green, an Episcopal Church in the heart of New Haven. ~ Mary Twining Gridley (d. 1915) was the widow of a professor at Hamilton College and a patron of the arts in Clinton and New Haven, who had served as president of the Mission Circle of Center Church Congregationalist – a likely conduit for a connection to Welcome Hall. ~ Owner’s signature in ink on flyleaf: “Elizabeth Louise Beecher, Feb. 25, 1911.” Small stain to fore-front board and with some abrasions to corners; otherwise near fine. In publisher’s green cloth, titled in hunter green. [OCLC locates six copies; Cook, page 45; Brown 308; not in Cagle].