Of all the personalities featured at the fair, perhaps none more fully represented the bridge between the old food world and the new than Sarah Tyson Rorer. The proprietor of the Philadelphia Cooking School, domestic science editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and author of more than 50 cookbooks and pamphlets, Rorer was one of the most influential cooking authorities of the late 19th century. For the St. Louis exposition, the famous cooking teacher turned restaurateur operated a large facility in the Eastern Pavilion on Art Hill, where she presided over breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and supper and, in between seatings, lectured on “domestic economy.”
The fare at Rorer’s restaurant reflected the major shift in American cooking that she was helping usher in. Rorer insisted that “simplicity is elegance.” Instead of the elaborate multicourse meals of the Victorian era, her cookbooks declared that “‘simple dinners’ are now the correct thing.” She also sold her World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book (1904) for 50 cents a copy. The book promised to “present in compact form a few choice recipes from the Eastern Pavilion at the Fair” and to “show how simply and easily all foods may be prepared.”
