(Chinese) Watanna, Onoto [Winnifred Eaton] and Sara Bosse. Chinese-Japanese Cook Book.

120 + 2 pp. of advertisements for the Hotel Monthly. (12mo) 16.8x8.8 cm (6½x3"), original stiff brown cloth wrappers, lettered in gilt, patterned endpapers. First softbound Edition, slightly smaller format than the hardbound. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914. 

 This first published Asian-American cookbook offers some 200 recipes for “oriental” dishes like Lychee Chicken, Beef “Chou Main”, Gar Lu Chop Suey, Bird’s Nest Soup, Broiled Lobster and Stewed Pigeon, using “simple and clean ingredients” which would hopefully convince “Westerners” to “cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land.” Onoto Watanna, pseudonym of Winnifred Eaton, was already well-known for her popular Japanese-themed novels when she wrote this landmark cookbook with her sister, Sara Bosse, a Boston artist. Their other sister, Edith Eaton, writing as “Sui Sin Far”, was equally renowned for her Chinese-themed fiction. Very good condition; scarce in First Edition. 

7/27/18