author

Ida Lee Cary

A practical early-20th-century cook and tea-room entrepreneur, she wrote from real experience running a popular student tea room in Poughkeepsie. Her books blend straightforward recipes with hands-on advice for turning home cooking into hospitality.

1 Audiobook

Cook book of tested receipes

Cook book of tested receipes

by Ida Lee Cary

About the author

Ida Lee Cary was an early 20th-century American cookbook writer and business guide author best known for Cook Book of Tested Receipes and Tea Room Business, both published in 1920. Her work is closely tied to Poughkeepsie, New York, where contemporary editions identify her as the originator of the Vassar Tea Room.

In the introduction to Cook Book of Tested Receipes, she explains that she began by serving lunches, waffle suppers, and homemade candy from her parlor to college students, then expanded into a larger and very popular tea room. That firsthand experience gives her writing its charm: the recipes are direct and practical, and her business advice is aimed at ordinary women hoping to build something useful and profitable from home.

Not much confirmed biographical detail about her life seems to be widely preserved online, but her surviving books still offer a vivid glimpse of hospitality, home enterprise, and college-town food culture in the 1920s.