The cookbook’s recipes had one foot firmly in the 19th century and the other sneaking into the 20th. “Grandmother’s rice pudding” appeared right next to “cerealine blocks with jelly.” Cerealine was the first dried breakfast food, an early version of cornflakes, which were invented in the 1880s and grew in popularity in the 1890s—a small hint of the commercial products that were about to transform the home kitchen. (In the Palace of Agriculture, in fact, the Quaker Oats exhibit featured a new process invented just the year before: Every 50 minutes, a load of rice was put into giant cannons and heated until it exploded from the barrels, puffed to eight times its original size.)
And more sanitary, too. At Rorer’s restaurant at the World’s Fair, the food was touted as being prepared “on hygienic principles.” It was the early years of industrial food production, and the business was rife with spoilage, adulteration, and outright fraud.
