Steward's Handbook and Guide to Party Catering-in Five Parts... Sixth edition

Chicago: Jessup Whitehead & Co., Pubs, 1903. Thick octavo (23 x 15.5 cm.), v, 464, 29, [7] pages. Publisher's advertisements. Illustrated. Sixth Edition. Jessup Joseph Whitehead (1833-1889) emigrated from England as a young man with his widowed mother and brothers, settling in Kansas Territory in the early 1850s. From 1853 he is known to have worked as a cook on steamships and in hotels. In August 1862 he enrolled in the Union Army in Kansas City, alongside his brother Charles, eventually taking a position as cook for the 10th Missouri Cavalry, Company M. After the Civil War his name appears as the author of feuilletons and occasional essays for newspapers as far afield as the Laramie Boomerang and the London Telegraph, and for such trade bulletins as The Daily National Hotel Reporter and The Caterer, possibly at the instigation of Charles, who had graduated to editorial positions in several newspapers, first in Kansas, and later in California. In the 1880s he compiled and sold anthologies of his columns, and a number of them, too, are included in both the Family Cook Book and The Book of Breads and Cakes – titles that he combined under his own imprint for the first time in 1883 (cf Bitting, Gastronomic Bibliography, page 493). ~ By 1887, if not before, Whitehead had become a favorite of visitors to the Sweetwater Park Hotel in Lithia Springs, near Atlanta, a famous resort which had opened in 1880. At the time of his death, in May 1889, he had undertaken to supervise the kitchen of Hotel Monte Sano, another luxury resort destination, near Huntsville, Alabama. His will stipulated that his estate be divided between his sons and the editor of his publishing enterprise in Chicago, and his books continued therefore to be issued into the 1920s. ~ Clean and sound internally. In publisher's textured brown cloth, gilt-titled. Very light wear to edges, otherwise fine.