Sarah Tyson Rorer

Life and Times

Sarah Tyson Rorer (1849 – 1937) was a nineteenth-century American prodigious writer of cookbooks. In addition, she was a cooking teacher, a speaker and a newspaper columnist.

She wrote columns for Table Talk magazine (of which she was part owner, 1886-1892.) She then became editor of Household News for four years (1893-1897 ), which was then absorbed into Ladies Home Journal, which she edited for the following 14 years (1897-1911.) She was then lured to Good Housekeeping Magazine where she was put in charge of the food section. [1]

Mrs Rorer was particularly interested in the scientific impact of food upon the body. For this, some consider her to be America’s first dietician. She referred to her area of specialty as “dietetics” and “hygienics”, as did many of her era. Even though most of her professional knowledge came from self-education (it being a new field and all), that didn’t lessen the strength of her convictions. She was highly and firmly opinionated, inviting her audiences to believe that her views on food had the full force of morality behind them. She was also one of the first major proponents of the “chafing dish.”

Sarah Tyson Rorer (who also went by the name of “Sallie”) was born as Sarah Tyson Heston on 18 October 1849 in Richboro, Bucks County, Pennsylvania in her grandparents home. Her parents were Charles Tyson Heston (19 July 1825 – 1876) and Elizabeth Sagers (died 1879.) Her father was a manufacturing chemist.

Shortly after Sarah was born, the family moved to Buffalo, New York for her father’s work. There, her brother Albert was born in 1851.

Sarah went to school at the East Aurora Academy in East Aurora, Erie County, New York State (today, 25 miles south of downtown Buffalo.) Many graduates of the apparently now-defunct Academy went on to become minor American notables. As a student, Sarah was interested in sciences, focussing on chemistry and astronomy. The chemistry interest she presumably got from her father; it’s assumed the study of astronomy came about because it was considered an acceptable science for young women at the time. Her actual interest was chemistry, though, and she wanted to be a pharmacist.

During the American Civil War, her father served as a druggist in an army hospital unit [1]. Like many others, he returned in poor health. Sarah helped her mother prepare foods that would help him.

In 1870, the family moved back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Shortly after the move, Sarah started trying to do the placement work necessary to become a dispensing pharmacist. However, the entry barriers for women to the trade at the time were too high, and she decided not to fight the battle. Particularly, presumably, because marriage was on the horizon. In 1871, she married a William Rorer; the couple would have three children, a daughter who died as a child before the age of two, and two sons, William Albert Rorer and James Birch Rorer.

When they married, the couple lived at first in Colebrook, Pennsylvania, then moved back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1880, Sarah decided to take a cooking class at the New Century Club in Philadelphia. She was by most accounts a star pupil, so much so that when the instructor, a Miss Devereux, suddenly resigned, Sarah was asked by the club to actually teach the class. She was 32 at the time.

Sarah intensified her programme of self-education, attending lectures at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She was then asked to speak at the same college, narrowing in on the topic of the relationship between health and food.

In 1882, with four of her cousins, she founded the Philadelphia Cooking School at 1518 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. There, she taught the science behind cooking, and how to serve food, as well as kitchen chores such as cleaning. She would run the school for the next 18 years.

In 1886, she published Mrs. Rorer’s Philadelphia Cook Book. She decided to follow the methodology established in 1884 by Mary J. Lincoln in the “Boston Cook Book” and separate the ingredients from the instructions.

During these years, she began travelling to give her lectures. “She traveled the country demonstrating tableside cookery, with her own jewel-encrusted chafing dish…” [3] In 1893, during the six months of the first Chicago World Fair, “a ‘corn kitchen’ was conducted in one section of the woman’s building by Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer of Philadelphia, the well known lecturer and authority on cookery, under the auspices of the women of Illinois, a large sum having been set aside for that purpose. Cooking demonstrations were given daily, as were also lectures on the food value and properties of the cereal.” [2] In 1895 she gave lectures at the concert hall at Madison Square Garden.

In 1896, she separated from her husband.

For a few years at the turn of the century, she gave cooking lessons in the autumns at the H. Batterman department store in Brooklyn.

At one point, she regularly taught in a lecture hall at Mt Gretna, Pennsylvania, during the summers. The hall was named Rorer Hall after her (Mt Gretna’s Hall of Philosophy is now on the site.)

Starting in her sixties, she began wintering in Trinidad. Her son James was living there, working as a mycologist. [1] She used the post to keep up with her editing and writing work back in the States during these Caribbean winters.

In the 1920s, she also began giving weekly radio talks on cooking, though her activity otherwise started to get restricted to various product endorsements.

Despite the changing times, the roaring 20s, and Sarah’s accomplishments, she was no “woman’s libber.” In 1925, she was honoured at the second Chicago World Fair, and she used this occasion to attribute the advances of women to a change in men, and to devices that men had created: