Dine at Home with Rector by George Rector

Hardcover. 1937, third printing.

Rector was born in Chicago, where his father, Charles E. Rector, ran Rector’s Oyster House. He claimed his father took him out of Cornell University where he was studying law, and sent him to Paris to learn how to make a sauce for filet of sole.

Rector and his father ran several restaurants in New York State and Chicago. In Home on the Range, he wrote that he got his start in the business peeling potatoes and cleaning chickens in his father’s kitchens.

At Rector’s on Broadway in New York City, he and his father were known for serving celebrities of the 1910s. George Rector’s New York Times obituary stated Rector’s was “a leading resort of the theatrical, financial and social worlds of those days”. The restaurant closed with the coming of prohibition.