author
Edith B. Cohen
A practical voice from an earlier era of home cooking, she helped create a kosher cookbook designed to make everyday meals simpler, thriftier, and more approachable for young housekeepers. Her work offers a small but vivid window into Orthodox Jewish domestic life in the late 19th century.
1 Audiobook
The Economical Jewish Cook: A Modern Orthodox Recipe Book for Young Housekeepers
by May Henry, Edith B. Cohen
About the author
Edith B. Cohen is known for The Economical Jewish Cook: A Modern Orthodox Recipe Book for Young Housekeepers, a cookbook she arranged with May Henry. The book presents economical kosher cooking in a clear, instructional style and was meant to be useful enough to serve as a class book for schools.
The title page identifies both women as certificated by the National Training School for Cookery, which helps explain the book’s practical tone and orderly approach. In the preface to a revised edition dated January 1897, the authors note that the book had already found readers and had been expanded with additional recipes.
Very little biographical information about Edith B. Cohen appears to be readily available in major online literary sources, so most of what can be said with confidence comes from the cookbook itself and bibliographic records. Even so, her contribution remains valuable: she helped preserve a tradition-minded, budget-conscious style of Jewish cookery for later generations.