A few months ago, browsing a shelf of cookbooks at an antique store, I came across some early-40s booklets illustrated with the sort of unintentionally garish food photography that gives pre-U.S. of Arugula cookery a bad name. 250 Ways to Prepare Meat had me at hello, with recipes for reindeer pot roast, stewed squirrels, and roast opossum—but what really piqued my interest was that it was published by an outfit with a Loop address called the Culinary Arts Institute. Some cursory googling yielded numerous references to the Culinary Institute of America and less august cooking schools, but adding the editor’s name—Ruth Berolzheimer—to the search turned up a number of out-of-print titles for resale and a comprehensive bibliography (friktech.com/cai/cai.htm) on the CAI, which was at one time the largest publisher of cookbooks in the country.
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Even before that Davidow’s small backlist showed remarkable diversity in light of what is popularly considered to be the dark ages of American gastronomy. He followed 1934’s Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook with The New England Cookbook, The Southern Cookbook, and even The Chinese Cookbook, by M. Sing Au. After he bought the Delineator recipes, he republished much of the material in a series of booklets with titles like Feeding the Pre-School Child and Bridge Luncheon Menus; Daniels says there were many that he’s yet to come across.
Aside from Daniels’s meticulous bibliography, there doesn’t seem to be much information out there on the inner workings of the CAI—which had a test kitchen in various locations around Chicago over the years, including one at 153 N. Michigan. Nor is there much biographical information on Berolzheimer, who served as director for 11 years during which the company put out many of its best-known titles.
The circumstances under which Berolzheimer returned to Chicago and signed on with Davidow aren’t clear, but from 1938 to 1949 she served as director and editor, her name appearing on almost every publication it released—including The American Woman’s Cookbook and its many subsequent printings and other major CAI titles like The Encyclopedic Cookbook and The Dairy Cookbook. (There were also wartime editions of The American Woman’s Cookbook, which provided “victory substitutes and economical recipes.”) Her resumé also lists more than two dozen smaller titles, from Body-Building Dishes for Children to 500 Sandwiches.
