Newspaper databases, as I’ve said, are the archive detective’s best friend. But that doesn’t mean the discoveries are always sunshine and roses. Some are just … irritating. Especially when they’re written 87 years ago, so you can’t let off some steam by writing a Letter to the Editor about them.

I was wondering about a publication date for Kitchen Kraft, a charming community cookbook published by the Women’s Club … sometime. The book itself doesn’t show a printing date. But — what if the club announced the publication in the Montclair Times?

Good news: Montclair book columnist Charles Coates kicked off  his March 28, 1931 “Saturday Book Table” column with an item on the just-published Kitchen Kraft. Mystery solved!

The bad news: He was a bit condescending  about it. Let’s dive in.

 

A masterpiece of stark, simple realism—superb in its vivid, vital, compelling force—is “Kitchen Kraft” (a modern book released by the Home Economics Department of the Montclair Women’s Clubs [sic]).

Held spellbound by its forceful, vivid descriptive style, we could not set this little volume down until we had read it from cover to cover. … No book we have ever reviewed in this column has caused the pupils of eyes to dilate or set our salivary glands to working overtime.

The authors of “Kitchen Kraft” are no tricky stylists … They never mince, chop, dice slice or grate their words.

 

Coates goes on to transcribe two recipes from the cookbook, and concludes:

 

We submit that here is literature of the first rank. How many American writers can lay claim to a masterpiece like this? Could Sinclair Lewis write one? Could James Branch Cabell do it? [Ed. Note: Who? Look here] Could Ernest Hemingway do it? No.

So today the Book Table tenders its own Nobel Prize to the able committee who prepared the book. Mrs. Sumner Rhoades was chairman and the members were: The Mmes. Martin J. Synnott; Herbert W. Ellis, Louis S. Shaul, Alfred S. Hamilton, William J Ward, John L. Campbell, Carl H. Beck, Frederick S. Magnus, George K. Platt, Herbert C. Davidson, Howard L. Davis, and S. Brent Girdler.

That last paragraph is full of Invisible Woman Syndrome, of course. A couple of additional observations:

• Coates doesn’t say where or how you could buy the book (I found brief references elsewhere in the Montclair Times that mentioned it was available at $1 per copy).
• A charitable person might say Coates was aiming for a playfully affectionate tone.
• A less charitable person [Ed. Note: Like this writer] might say he was a touch TOO sarcastic. The women of the club weren’t shooting for literary prizes — they were putting together some recipes and raising some money. But who knows, perhaps they got a kick out of Coates’ column!

At any rate, this is a great example of how newspaper research can solve a tricky dating problem in minutes — while providing a quirky bit of context in the bargain.