Cover of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Fannie Merritt Farmer
First printing, 1896 · Little, Brown and Company, Boston
Portrait of Fannie Merritt Farmer
Fannie Merritt Farmer
1857–1915

Principal of the Boston Cooking-School. Author of the first American cookbook to require level, standardized measurements. Published the first printing at her own expense after Little, Brown doubted it would sell.

Hundreds
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1896
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Card My Recipe
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Fannie Merritt Farmer · 1896

Preserved from a verified first printing and organized as a working browser of recipes, menus, and reference sections. Recipe text remains verbatim to the 1896 book, with Kitchen Notes kept separate from the source text.

The book first appeared in 1896 after Farmer financed publication herself when Little, Brown doubted that a manual built on precise level measurements would find a wide readership. Its success brought the book into regular trade publication and helped fix cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons as the standard language of American recipe writing.

Born in Boston in 1857, Farmer went on to lead the Boston Cooking-School and to codify the level cup, tablespoon, and teaspoon that still structure American recipe writing. Her book is both a practical manual and a record of how domestic instruction was formalized at the end of the nineteenth century.

The book below keeps the table of contents, recipe cards, scanned page links, and menu structure together so the original volume can still be read and cooked from as a whole.

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Articles

Timing and reference page from the 1896 first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
History
How Fannie Farmer Standardized American Cooking

Why the 1896 first edition mattered, and how level measurements, sequenced method, and kitchen instruction traveled from the Boston Cooking School into ordinary recipe writing.

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Portrait recipe card preview of Strawberry Short Cake I. from the Fannie Farmer collection
Preservation
From Historical Cookbook to Recipe Card

How a dense nineteenth-century cookbook page becomes a readable, source-linked card without quietly rewriting the historical record.

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Bread, rolls, muffins, biscuits, and breakfast cakes

Baking Powder Biscuit I.

70 · First Edition, 1896 · Report an issue
Source and cookbook navigation

Transcribed from the 1896 first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer.

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Ingredients

  • 2 cups flour
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon lard
  • ¾ cup milk and water, in equal parts
  • 1 tablespoon butter

Method

  1. Mix dry ingredients, and sift twice.
  2. Work in butter and lard with tips of fingers; add gradually the liquid, mixing with knife to a soft dough.
  3. It is impossible to determine the exact amount of liquid, owing to differences in flour.
  4. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll lightly to one-half inch in thickness.
  5. Shape with a biscuit-cutter.
  6. Place on buttered pan, and bake in hot oven twelve to fifteen minutes.
  7. If baked in too slow an oven, the gas will escape before it has done its work.

Kitchen Notes

  • Original calls for a hot oven — about 400°F.

Original 1896 Text

2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon lard ¾ cup milk and water, in equal parts 1 tablespoon butter Mix dry ingredients, and sift twice. Work in butter and lard with tips of fingers; add gradually the liquid, mixing with knife to a soft dough. It is impossible to determine the exact amount of liquid, owing to differences in flour. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll lightly to one-half inch in thickness. Shape with a biscuit-cutter. Place on buttered pan, and bake in hot oven twelve to fifteen minutes. If baked in too slow an oven, the gas will escape before it has done its work.

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