Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes

Written for Walter Baker & Company, the booklet preface compares the 1860 and 1910 household consumption of chocolate and claims that while coffee and tea consumption increased, the rate was not nearly as spectacular as that of chocolate. "It is evident that the coming American is going to be less of a tea and coffee drinker, and more of a cocoa and chocolate drinker."

In the late 1800s, Miss Maria Parloa was a celebrity chef and despite her adeptness in the kitchen, she could not have seen that chocolate would move from a drink to a solid form. Indeed she was a celebrated cookbook author and cooking instructor. Parloa lectured at the Boston Cooking School and along with other women, such as Fannie Merritt Farmer, she helped spearhead the American home economics movement, which sought to apply scientific principles to improve nutrition, cooking methods and hygiene in the American home.

Parloa's acknowledgement of particular brand name products heralded a new age of celebrity endorsements. Eventually Parloa would lend her name to recipe books, including this one for Walter Baker & Company.

In 1896, Fannie Merritt Farmer published her well-known work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Farmer had been a student of Parloa's and she eventually ran the Boston Cooking School. Frank O'Connor who named his popular retail chain in "her honor" started his Fanny Farmer Candy stores in 1919. She did not publicly endorse the Fanny Farmer Candy stores, which used a variation on her name, as she had died four years earlier.