The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book

Fannie Merritt Farmer

First printing, 1896 · Little, Brown and Company, Boston

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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Beef

Beef Stew with Dumplings.

182-183 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Beef Stew with Dumplings. Aitchbone, weighing 5 lbs. 4 cups potatoes, cut in ¼ inch slices. Turnip, Carrot, } ⅔ cup each, cut in half-inch cubes. ½ small onion, cut in thin slices. ¼ cup flour. Salt. Pepper. about three hours). salt and pepper the last hour of cooking. Wipe meat, remove from bone, cut in one and one-half inch cubes, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Cut some of the fat in small pieces and try out in frying-pan. Add meat and stir constantly, that the surface may be quickly seared; when well browned, put in kettle, and rinse frying-pan with boiling water, that none of the goodness may be lost. Add to meat remaining fat, and bone sawed in pieces; cover with boil- ing water and boil five minutes, then cook at a lower temperature until meat is tender (time required being Add carrot, turnip, and onion, with Parboil pota- toes five minutes, and add to stew fifteen minutes before taking from fire. Remove bones, large pieces of fat, and then skim. Thicken with one-fourth cup flour, diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Pour in deep hot platter, and surround with dumplings. Remnants of roast beef are usually made into a beef stew ; the meat having been once cooked, there is no necessity of browning it. If gravy is left, it should be added to the stew.