The Dinner Year-Book

"The Dinner Year-Book" by Marion Harland is a practical cookbook written in the late 19th century. This work serves as a guide for home cooks, focusing primarily on providing a comprehensive set of dinner menus for each day of the month alongside detailed recipes. The author aims to alleviate the daily dilemma faced by many housewives: planning and preparing varied and delicious meals for the family. The opening of the book introduces the author's own frustrations with meal planning, emphasizing the struggles of avoiding monotony and managing leftovers. Harland establishes a friendly tone as she addresses her readers, promising a structured approach to family dinners and a collection of adaptable menus that correspond to seasonal ingredients and the typical American market. Her strategy combines thoughtful meal design with efficient use of resources, including left-over ingredients and practical cooking tips, thereby setting the stage for the various meal options and recipes that follow in the book. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Mary Virginia Terhune, also known by her penname Marion Harland, was an American author who was prolific and bestselling in both fiction and non-fiction genres. Born in Amelia County, Virginia, she began her career writing articles at the age of 14, using various pennames until 1853, when she settled on Marion Harland. Her first novel Alone was published in 1854 and became an "emphatic success" following its second printing the next year. For fifteen years she was a prolific writer of best-selling women's novels, classified then as "plantation fiction", as well as writing numerous serial works, short stories, and essays for magazines.