Eisenhower Had A Cake?

     We shelve books of all genres on our used book floor, but without a doubt, the books that provide the most interesting finds for us have been found in the cooking section.  People seem to feel that cookbooks are a good place to jot down notes or tuck in newspaper articles.  Really - check out the cookbooks on your shelves some rainy day and see what we mean. Cookbooks are clearly windows to our souls.

    This week’s find on the used book floor was discovered in…you guessed it, a cookbook!  Published in 1929, the “Rumford Complete Cookbook” was put together by the Department of Home Economics of the Rumford Chemical Company in Providence, R.I.  We know you are thinking it, so we’re just going to put it right out there…a chemical company that puts together a cookbook?  Interesting.

     Taped to the back cover of the book is a newspaper recipe clipping from 1955 for the Eisenhower Chocolate Cake.  This was not just any chocolate cake, we discovered.  Upon doing a little research we found that during his first year in office, Hershey hosted a giant 63^rd birthday party for President Eisenhower and constructed a cake that was 9 feet wide and 6 feet tall.  This gigantic chocolate confection was made mostly of plywood and paper mache, but there was a very small portion of it that was actual cake created specifically for Eisenhower in honor of his birthday.  Only the President and his wife were allowed to eat from that cake, as the 600 other guests dined on alternate confections.  It was during this celebration that the Eisenhower Chocolate Cake was born and the recipe became a hot commodity.  It, therefore, makes sense that the woman who owned this cookbook 62 years ago would have considered the Eisenhower Chocolate Cake recipe newspaper clipping to be a “must have” in her cookbook.  Who knew?  We included a picture of the recipe in case you want to try your hand at it, too.    

       The Eisenhower Chocolate Cake recipe is only one of many newspaper clippings that we found pasted into the “Rumford Complete Cookbook” and the cookbook (complete with finds) is for sale here at Bayswater for the price of $19.99, as it was published in 1929.  To catch up with our previous finds of the week from the used book floor, you can always check us out at bayswaterbooks.com and on facebook, or stop by the store in Center Harbor and check out the used book floor for yourself!