The Up-To-Date Cook Book: A Collection of Tested Recipes. Compiled by The Ladies' Benefit Society of the Baptist Church, North Bellingham, Massachusetts

West Medway, Mass: H. A. Bullard, Book and Job Printer, 1908. Octavo (21.5 x 14 cm.), 84 pages. Advertisements (some illustrated). "Index" is actually a table of contents. Photographic image of the church reproduced on the front panel of the wrappers. Evident FIRST EDITION. A charitable church cookbook from Norfolk County, to the southwest of Boston and some thirty kilometers north of Providence. With three hundred fifty recipes, the majority attributed; including: Chestnut Soup, Asparagus Cream Soup, Clam Chowder, Chicken Pie, Oysters and Macaroni, Entire Wheat Bread, Steamed Graham Bread, Blueberry Gems, Sweet Biscuit, Rye Meal Pudding, Indian Pudding, Ada's Vegetable Pudding (with carrots, potatoes, and raisins), Baked Apple Dumplings, Cranberry Puffs, Hot Slaw, Beet Relish, Pearl Cake, Six Months Cake (with "1 teaspoonful all kinds of spices"), Hickory Nut Cake, Rolled Oat Macaroons, Twentieth Century Lemon Pie, Coffee Mousse, Banana Ice Cream, Vinegar Cream Candy, Pear Conserve. "Up-to-date" is the tacit endorsement of consumer brands called for within recipes, notably Kingsford's Corn Starch and Ralston Health Food. The variety of approaches to cake-baking is similarly "of the moment" – for instance, the batter of Lightning Cake (with baking powder) must be "beat like lightning" (page 53); an Apple Sauce Cake (with soda dissolved in warm water) calls for the acid reactant "sour apple sauce, letting it foam over the ingredients in the bowl" (page 51) – that is, applesauce without sugar (not, one imagines, sauce from soured apples). Another "up-to-date" note, incidentally, to the entry for Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt's Spice Cake, alerts readers that  "this recipe came directly from Mrs. Roosevelt to the Ladies' Benefit Society" (page 49). ~ The town of Bellingham took its name from an early governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony; admirers of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter and of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's drama John Endicott, both of which contain portrayals of the governor, will recognize the name. The designation North Bellingham for the part of town north of the Charles River dates to the early seventeenth century, but the North Bellingham Baptist congregation assumed its name in October 1847 in order to distinguish itself from the First Baptist Church of Bellingham, adapting a hall within the Bates & Arnold Grist Mill "containing thirty-five pews, of which twenty-nine were let at once" (George Fairbanks Partridge, History of the Town of Bellingham, Massachusetts, 1719-1919 [Bellingham: The Town, 1919], page 167). It was chartered, after a hiatus occasioned by the Civil War, in 1868. The Up-To-Date Cook Book by all appearances, then, observes the congregation's fortieth anniversary. ~ The congregation was still meeting in the mill chapel as of 1884 (Stephen Coombs, "North Bellingham Baptist Church," History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, ed. Duane Hamilton Hurd (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1884), pages 156-157); as of the present writing the date of origin of the church depicted photographically on the cover is unknown. It stands today, at the modern address 365 Hartford Avenue, and serves as the home of the descendent congregation, the Bellingham Bible Baptist Church. ~ Shelfworn; a number of pages dog-eared and several early leaves gashed with a closed tear at the fore-edge; staining to bottom edges; text unobscured and pages bright otherwise. Stapled in publisher's gray wrappers, lettered in black; creased and abraded; chipping to corners and spine. Poor. Unrecorded. [OCLC locates no copies; not in Bitting, Cook, Brown, or Cagle].