Abstract This article uses a 1903 text by the Irish cookery instructress Kathleen Ferguson to examine the intersections between food, medicine and domestic work. Sick Room Cookery, and numerous texts like it, drew on traditions of domestic medicine and Anglo-Irish gastronomy while also seeking to establish female expertise informed by modern science and medicine. Placing the text in its broader cultural context, the article examines how it fit into the tradition of domestic medicine and the emerging profession of domestic science. Giving equal weight to the history of food and of medicine, and seeing each as shaped by historical context, help us to see the practice of feeding the sick in a different way.