How Henriette Schønberg Erken taught Norway to cook: the 24 kitchen demonstrations

Long before Henriette Schønberg Erken became Norway's best-selling cookbook author, she was first and foremost one thing: a teacher. Stor kokebok ("The Big Cookbook") did not appear until 1914. By then she had already spent more than ten years standing before classes of young women, showing them, pot by pot, how good food is made. Her teaching became one of the most widely used textbooks in Norwegian home economics – and it reveals a great deal about how she thought.

The textbook that became a household book

Together with the physician Caroline Steen, Erken published Kogebog for skole og hjem ("A Cookbook for School and Home"). The pairing was no accident: a doctor who knew the science of nutrition, and a home-economics teacher who knew the kitchen. The book was a success without parallel. By 1903 it had reached its "fourteenth thousand" – 14,000 copies – and kept going through new printings.

The publisher saw that the practical material had value in its own right. In 1903 Erken writes in the foreword to a separate booklet:

"As 'A Cookbook for School and Home', published jointly by the physician Caroline Steen and the undersigned, has now appeared in its 4th revised printing, the publisher has wished to bring to market at the same time an offprint of the book's second section, concerning the practical instruction."

That "second section" – the cooking course itself – was thus issued separately. And this is where the demonstrations come in.

Cooking taught as a series of demonstrations

The offprints were given a telling name: "300 recipes presented in 24 demonstrations." Erken did not divide the material into dry chapters, but into demonstrations – concrete lessons in which a group of dishes was made from start to finish. Each demonstration had a theme, and the themes paint a fine picture of what a well-schooled kitchen was meant to master around the year 1900:

• Soups – from clear bouillon to vegetable soup and meat soup
• Fish dishes – such as fish gratin with macaroni
• Meat dishes – meat cakes, roast beef and Wiener schnitzel
• Vegetables and sauces, like the classic cauliflower sauce
• Salads – among them herring salad
• Desserts – caramel pudding and orange fromage
• Baking – fine pastry such as Berlin wreaths
• And separate demonstrations devoted to the dinner party, cold-table dishes, fruit – and even one just about oranges.

To the original 24 she later added "two supplementary demonstrations" with a further 20 recipes. The thinking is clear: you do not learn to cook by reading a recipe, but by watching a whole menu come together – and understanding why each step is taken.

The teacher behind the recipes

This demonstration method is the key to understanding Erken. Where other cookbooks merely listed dishes, she built instruction: sequence, timing, how to use a hot oven for several dishes, how the leftovers from one demonstration become an ingredient in the next. The same systematic eye meets us again in everything she later wrote – from the housekeeping advice in Little Cookbook to the frugal menus of Good, cheap daily fare.

Nor did she write for the elite. The title for school and home was a programme: knowledge of food was to reach ordinary kitchens, in town and country. When a few years later she made her own booklets such as A Cookbook for Thrifty Housewives (1905) and Cheap Food (1914), it was the same teacher speaking – now to those with the least to spare.

The recipes live on here

The 300 demonstration recipes are not a separate work in our archive – they are, in the main, the recipes from A Cookbook for School and Home, which you will find fully transcribed and modernized here. So you can follow Erken's cooking course in practice: begin with a soup, move on to a fish dish and a meat dish, finish with a dessert – exactly as she herself built a demonstration more than a hundred years ago.