Quantity Cookery: Menu Planning and Cooking for Large Numbers

A window into the origins of modern institutional cooking, written when feeding hundreds or thousands daily was becoming a science unto itself. Lenore Richards addresses the puzzles that still face food managers today: how do you feed diverse populations nutritionally? How do economics shape the menu? How do you balance health guidelines with what people actually want to eat? She approaches menu design as an art grounded in logic, emphasizing the need to understand specific clientele, whether hospital patients, schoolchildren, or factory workers. She advocates for seasonal ingredients not from nostalgia but from practical economics. The book explores how economic conditions and demographic shifts demand flexibility from any institutional kitchen. For food historians, culinary professionals, and anyone curious about the hidden machinery of feeding masses, this remains a revealing time capsule that shows how institutional cooking first learned to think systematically about feeding people at scale.