Medicine: Culinary Bibliophile

Can she make a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy? Can she make a cherry pie, charming Billy? She can make a cherry pie, quick’s a cat can wink her eye, She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

Had amiable Dr. Margaret Barclay Wilson heard the roundelay as a display of her old cook books was set up in the New York Academy of Medicine building last week, she would have applauded. She, professor of physiology & hygiene at Manhattan’s Hunter College,* dotes goodhumoredly on any reference to good cooking. During the War she worked on the problem of food substitutes. Her study sent her to old cook books. Collecting them became a hobby. Now she has 4,000, largest collection of its kind, which she is giving to the New York Academy of Medicine. Oldest specimen is a manuscript, written about 870 A.D., of Apicius De re Coquinaria (On Cookery), which collates some of the ancient recipes the Romans considered choice. Ancient cookery differed little from modern. Roast pork and apples was a Roman, dish, also duck and turnip. The Romans had no sugar, used honey. Honey and cheese made a delicate dish. Pepper was new to them. They used it profusely. Cinnamon they knew but used it at burials, not in the kitchen. When Dr. Wilson could not understand a recipe, she prepared the dish in her own kitchen. Gently proud was she last week of the “gentlemen and scholars who have relished my old cookery.”

*Largest U. S. college for women; total enrolment 16,948.