author

Evora Bucknum Perkins

A practical food reformer as well as a writer, she helped popularize vegetarian cooking through clear, usable recipes and health-minded instruction. Her work grew out of teaching, restaurant work, and Seventh-day Adventist mission efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

1 Audiobook

The Laurel Health Cookery A Collection of Practical Suggestions and Recipes for the Preparation of Non-Flesh Foods in Palatable and Attractive Ways

The Laurel Health Cookery A Collection of Practical Suggestions and Recipes for the Preparation of Non-Flesh Foods in Palatable and Attractive Ways

by Evora Bucknum Perkins

About the author

Born in 1851 and active into the early 1900s, Evora Bucknum Perkins was an American educator, cookbook writer, restaurateur, and missionary associated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church. She is best known for The Laurel Health Cookery, a cookbook that presented non-meat dishes in a practical, approachable way.

Her career connected several worlds at once: teaching, vegetarian food reform, and health education. Sources describe her as a lecturer on cookery and hygiene who also helped manage vegetarian restaurants, giving her writing a grounded, everyday usefulness rather than a purely theoretical tone.

That mix of instruction and lived experience makes her especially interesting today. Her books reflect a moment when cooking, religion, temperance, and public health were closely linked, and they show how early advocates of vegetarian eating tried to make healthier food appealing to ordinary households.