Published in 1876 in Michigan, The Hygienic Cook Book was part of the 19th century health reform movement that stressed a vegetarian diet to achieve wellness. Author John Harvey Kellogg, an American physician, took the health reformer’s diet even further by emphasizing abstinence from caffeine, alcohol, spices, condiments, dairy, eggs, and vinegar. Kellogg believed that “[c]ondiments are innutritious and irritating….they irritate the digestive organs, impairing their tone and deranging their function.” Above all, he stressed the importance of bowel health for an overall healthy body. 

This edition of The Hygienic Cook Book was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the society is a research library documenting the lives of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection comprises approximately 1,100 volumes.