author
Olive M. Hulse
Known today for practical early-20th-century cookbooks, this author gathered and tested recipes meant to be genuinely useful in everyday kitchens. Her books on salads, desserts, and casseroles offer a clear window into home cooking in the 1910s.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Olive M. Hulse was an American cookbook writer whose known works were published in Chicago by The Hopewell Press in the 1910s. Confirmed titles include Two hundred recipes for making salads, with thirty recipes for dressings and sauces (1910), Two hundred recipes for making desserts, including French pastries (1912), and Two hundred recipes for cooking in casseroles (1914).
In the preface to her salad book, she explains that collecting salad recipes had been her hobby for many years, and that she drew on the help of chefs from "some of the best cuisines in the country." That gives her work a nice mix of home-kitchen practicality and restaurant-era ambition.
Very little reliable biographical information about her life appears to be readily available online, so it is safest to remember her chiefly through the cookbooks themselves. Those books are concise, recipe-focused, and firmly rooted in the tastes and household cooking methods of early 20th-century America.