Foods for the Fat

Yorke-Davies, Nathaniel Edward. Foods for the Fat. (3rd Ed, 10th thou) Chatto & Windus: London, 1891. 8vo (190x120mm) red, black-stamped bds ix,[3],129,[3],32pp. Spine lifhtly sunned; bds faintly soiled; eps lightly foxed

YORKE-DAVIES, Nathaniel Edward.

Foods for the Fat: a treatise on corpulence, and its scientific dietary cure.

London : Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly 1891. Third edition revised, tenth thousand.  First published  1889.  Printed by Billing and Sons, Guildford.

Octavo (190x120mm) red cloth, black ruled, stamped and decorated boards-stamped boards ix,[3],129,[3],32pp. Spine lightly sunned; boards faintly soiled; endpapers lightly foxed.

The text is in two parts: Part I Corpulency (pps 1-57) sets out the author's dietetic and medical theory; Part II The Dietetics of Obesity (pps 58-124) provides more practical advice for dieting, listing appropriate seasonal ingredients and approximately 190 recipes suited to reduction.  The recipes are broadly sensible, although the cooking times for vegetables are excessive by today's standards. 

One of  Yorke-Davies' clients was William H Taft, who sought to lose weight in 1905, some years before he became the 27th President of the United States¹.  Treated by correspondence, Taft initially lost a significant amount of weight.  Yorke-Davies and Taft corresponded for the better part of a decade.  Yorke-Davies' theories and prescriptions have some similarities with the low-carbohydrate, no-sugar, high protein diets that have been in vogue for the past thirty years (e.g., Atkins, Keto, Low G-I etc).  Saccharin was used by Yorke-Davies as a substitute for sugar in a number of the recipes here.

An extremely popular weight loss book that ran to some twenty editions in the UK and eighteen in the US.  Whereas in the early editions the number of recipes outweighed the dietetic advice, in later editions, the cookery sections were themselves much reduced and finally removed.

A scarce early edition.  An excellent insight into dietetic thinking and weight-loss practice during the Belle Epoque.

§  OCLC records only 3 holdings this edition: Free Library of Philadelphia, Wellcome and the National Library of Wales; and only 10 holdings earlier editions; no holdings in Australia.
§  Driver 289.2;

¹  Deborah I Levine. "Corpulence and Correspondence: President William H. Taft and the Medical Management of Obesity".  https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-159-8-201310150-00012