Cook Book

Chicago, Illinois: The Ladies Aid Society of St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1916. Soft cover. Good. Paperback, front cover design by "CB" (not credited within), 8-1/2" x 5-5/8", 137 pp. + blank leaves for notes. Some wear and creasing to wraps, a few pencil markings to text, generally clean and solid. Good condition. Generally, a traditional community cookbook with contributor names after recipes, and an emphasis on sweets! On page 72, however, we see "Chinese Cook's Recipe for Pop-Overs" contributed by Sing Lee. Certainly, a racist joke of the era rather than an indication of Chinese-American inclusion in this church, it starts with "You takee him 1 egg, 1 lit cup milk..." and after putting the pop-over in the oven, "Now you mind you business. No likee woman run look at him all time." Although authors like Paul Lawrence Dunbar would use dialect as a form of subversion, the dialect in this recipe comes from the vaudeville circuit, where "key words and phrases [let] the audience understand immediately which ethnic type was intended." (Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America, p. 172). Vaudeville acts used dialects to portray an ethnicity in order to make their jokes; unimaginative imitators thought the dialect itself was the humor.