The Suffrage Cookbook has a similar range of offerings as other cookbooks of the day, including tea sandwiches, main dishes, soups, cakes, preserves, pies, breads, and helpful kitchen hints. You can see the influence of ethnic recipes like Polenta and Goulash...and a probably not so great Americanized version of Chop Suey involving butter and Worcestershire sauce. And there's a kind of wry humor every now and then, like in the recipe for Pie for a Suffragist's Doubting Husband, which uses the Milk of Human Kindness and advises the cook to "[m]ix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm." Meat recipes are plentiful, which was also common in cookbooks of the time, but there are some vegetarian recipes for nut roasts and the like, though this seemed mainly to offer economic and protein-packed alternatives to meat as opposed to any concern about animal suffering. I guess it was one battle at a time back then and animal rights would come later.
With Election Day coming up, it is important to think about how just a century ago, women were still fighting for the right to vote, whether with protest and force and/or velvet gloves and tact. So many thanks to those who put this cookbook together and who demanded their turn at the ballot box, and additional thanks for this simple but delicious Cheese Savories recipe:
Butter slices of bread and sprinkle over them a mixture of grated cheese and paprika. Set them in a pan and place the pan in the oven, leaving it there until the bread is colored, and the cheese set. Serve very hot.
Eating and drinking are so essential to our living and to our usefulness, and so directly involved with our future state, that these must be classed with our sacred duties. Hence the necessity for so educating the children that they will know how to live, and how to develop into hale, hearty and wholesome men and women, thus insuring the best possible social and political conditions for the people of this country.
The Suffrage Cookbook, 1915
