Much Depends on Dinner (Mary Grosvenor Ellsworth)

Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1939. Hardcover with dust jacket. First edition. 

Before Alison Roman's Dining In, there was Mary Grosvenor Ellsworth's Much Depends on Dinner. Ellsworth was the food editor of House Beautiful and her quippy takes on the scourge of bored cooks and boring cooking are worth the price of admission. The volume is organized by ingredient, beginning with pantry staples and moving to perishables - a structure that will be familiar to contemporary cookbook fans. Determined to bring joy back to daily cooking Ellsworth writes: 

"I think food ought to be fun, and this book is primarily an attempt to suggest ways of getting fun out of planning and cooking it. For quite apart from the snobbisom that seems to infect anything so aesthetic as food, eating seems to me a fine thing in itself, a conscious pleasure, something to be approached with gusto. I have found it one of the chief delights of travel, an acute index to new people, and a bond with old friends. Three times a day it revives my ego as does any sensory indulgence, while meantime restoring my mortal frame. I suspect I should do as badly without the one effect as without the other." 

Dust jacket in protective sleeve. The jacket shows signs of age - fading and chipping at top and bottom edges of spine. Interior pages are lightly yellowed but still clear.