On the one hand, Rorer’s recipes follow the conventions of the receding Victorian age, with no ingredients lists, just instructions in paragraph form and steps amusingly out of order. No cooking temperatures are specified—just “in a hot oven” or “a quick oven”—and no precise cook times, either, since most Americans still baked in wood- or coal-burning ovens with no thermostats. Rorer, however, was an ardent proponent of innovations like the gas range, and in the years just after the World’s Fair, she became a paid endorser of gas stoves. “I used the first gas stove that came to America,” Rorer is quoted as saying in one 1910 advertisement. “In burning coal you have to make your own gas, which means labor, both in making and keeping of the fire and in cleaning.” Rorer, the ad went on, “thinks women spend too much time in the kitchen. She favors appliances that make kitchen work easier.”
