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.

1000+
Preserved Recipes
567
Original Pages
1896
First Edition
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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Pastry, pies, and meringues

Banbury Tarts.

396 · First Edition, 1896

Ingredients

  • 1 cup raisins.
  • 1 cup sugar.
  • 1 egg.
  • 1 cracker.
  • Juice and grated rind 1 lemon.

Method

  1. Stone and chop raisins, add sugar, egg slightly beaten, cracker finely rolled, and lemon juice and rind.
  2. Roll pastry one-eighth inch thick, and cut pieces three and one-half inches long by three inches wide.
  3. Put two teaspoons of mixture on each piece.
  4. Moisten edge with cold water half-way round, fold over, press edges together with three-tined fork, first dipped in flour.
  5. Bake twenty minutes in slow oven.

Kitchen Notes

  • Original calls for a slow oven — about 300°F.

Original 1896 Text

Banbury Tarts. 1 cup raisins. 1 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1 cracker. Juice and grated rind 1 lemon. Stone and chop raisins, add sugar, egg slightly beaten, cracker finely rolled, and lemon juice and rind. Roll pastry one-eighth inch thick, and cut pieces three and one-half inches long by three inches wide. Put two teaspoons of mixture on each piece. Moisten edge with cold water half-way round, fold over, press edges together with three-tined fork, first dipped in flour. Bake twenty minutes in slow oven.