Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook.

Published in 1961 by Doubleday and Company, Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook is the ambitious culinary companion to the author's bestselling Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette (1952), and together the two volumes defined the aspirational midcentury American household. Running to more than eight hundred pages and containing some two thousand recipes, the book was conceived by Vanderbilt as nothing less than a comprehensive guide to cooking and entertaining for the modern American hostess, drawing on classical French technique, the regional traditions of the United States, and the increasingly cosmopolitan tastes of a postwar readership newly curious about Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and Scandinavian cookery. Vanderbilt enlisted a remarkable team of collaborators to realize the project, most notably the young Andrée Vilas Barnett and, famously, a then little-known cooking teacher named Julia Child, who contributed a number of the French recipes in the years just before her own Mastering the Art of French Cooking would appear and transform the American kitchen forever. The volume was illustrated throughout with charming line drawings by the renowned artist Andrew Warhola, who in the early 1960s was already beginning the transition from commercial illustrator to the Pop artist the world would come to know as Andy Warhol. The combination of Vanderbilt's authoritative voice, Child's quiet early presence, and Warhol's whimsical drawings has made the book an uncommonly desirable artifact of the midcentury American table, and first printings in the original dust jacket have become increasingly sought after by collectors of cookery, design, and twentieth-century Americana.