OP: The Art of Fine Baking

Simon and Schuster, 1961. Hardcover. Very Good Plus in Good jacket. First printing.

“[W]hy bother to bake in this era of cake mixes and even of fairly good commercial bakeries? The reason is that no commercial cake can ever taste like a home-baked one made with fresh butter and eggs. Furthermore, baking is fun.”

Fun, sure. If you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, baking can be wildly intimidating. 

Paula Peck’s first cookbook, The Art of Fine Baking (1961), is the perfect salve to any whisk-averse trepidation one might have upon entering the kitchen. Peck takes the time to thoughtfully define terms, describe techniques and ingredients, and offer useful tips before providing a full arsenal of recipes to satisfy any craving.

For those who don’t need a crash course in what “fold in the cheese” means or how to make a parchment paper piping bag, the recipes still leave plenty to discover. Some will have an old-fashioned charm ripe for a comeback, others are simply not the types of things we see in a general baking book these days. A few that caught our eye include: a black bread torte; peach vacherin; potato cream-filled coffee cake topped with cinnamon apples; and “melting” tea cake—an egg- and butter-heavy batter flavored with lemon and mace, crusted with blanched almonds.

It is not uncommon to find second hand copies of this book totally loved to pieces, so we are pleased to offer a very clean and sturdy first printing. The handsomely designed jacket is missing bits of paper, especially along the top edge, but, fortunately the type and illustration are unaffected.