Grab the Prosecco.
Pick a Recipe.
Make Some Gelatine.
Forget the traditional book club format. This book is meant to be experienced with your hands in the kitchen, a glass in hand and a group of friends ready to laugh, learn and taste something unexpected.
Dainty Desserts for Dainty People and Rose Knox’s biography features 28 original recipes pulled straight from Rose Knox's archives; everything from a silky Strawberry Bavarian Cream to a surprisingly delicious Coffee Jelly to the more adventurous Tuna Loaf. Each one tells a story about how American women cooked, entertained and innovated over a century ago.
Get Together
& Try Them
Round up your book club, your thrifting crew, your dinner party regulars or any group of friends who are up for something different.
Read the book. Dive into Rose Knox's remarkable story; a woman who transformed a small-town gelatine company into a national brand decades before the word "influencer" existed.
Pick a recipe. Each person in your group chooses one of the 28 recipes from the book. Go classic with the Bavarian Cream. Go bold with the Wine Jelly. Go full vintage with the Plum Pudding or Chocolate Blancmange.
Get together and make them. Open a couple bottles of Prosecco, set up your stations and get to work. Some will turn out gorgeous. Some will absolutely not. That is the point.
Eat, talk and share. Sit down together, taste what everyone made and talk about the book. Then post your creations so the rest of us can see how it went.
Your mother had a gelatine mold. Your grandmother definitely did.
Now it's your turn.
Not Into Jelly? There's a Recipe for That.
If the idea of molded desserts makes you nervous, start with the soup. Or the coffee jelly. Or skip the cooking entirely and just gather your group to talk about one of the most fascinating untold stories in American business history.
Prose & Prosecco: Discussion Questions
01
What memories do you have of gelatine dishes you have made or cooked? Your favorite? The one you hated? What recipes in the book do you think you would like to try?
02
What memories do you have of gelatine dishes you have made or cooked? Your favorite? The one you hated? What recipes in the book do you think you would like to try?
03
Why do you think Rose said “every woman if forced can do more than she thinks she can.” Who do you think she was talking to? What do you think she meant?
04
How much do you think that the model Mrs. Knox laid out is still followed, or in women’s heads today? What has changed?
05
Have any of you worked in a male environment where you felt you needed to do something to establish your credibility? What tactics did you follow? What did you consider and reject? What didn’t work?
06
Mrs. Knox and some of the women who followed her said there was no gender in business, though Mrs. Knox relied upon her gender to establish her credibility with her consumers. Do you think there are differences in how women and men operate in business?
07
What do you think it would have been like being married to Charles Knox?
08
Do you think there were other ways Rose Knox could have marketed Knox Gelatine in 1914?
09
What did you find most surprising in the book? Dismaying? Poignant?
10
Do you consider Rose Knox a feminist? Why or why not?
11
Why do you think she has been forgotten?
12
What strikes you about the photographs of her that are in the book – what do you think Mrs. Knox would have been like in person?
Get your copy, gather your group and make something worth talking about.
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