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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Poultry and game

Chicken Pie.

224 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Chicken Pie. a stewpan with one-half onion, sprig of parsley, and bit When chicken is half cooked, add one-half tablespoon salt and one-eighth teaspoon pepper. reduced to four cups. Thicken stock with one-third cup 3 lb. chicken. ½ cup butter. 2 onions. Dress, clean, and cut up two fowls or chickens. Put in of bay leaf; cover with boiling water, and cook slowly until tender. Remove chicken, strain stock, skim off fat, and then cook until flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Place a small cup in centre of baking-dish, arrange around it pieces of chicken, removing some of the larger bones ; pour over gravy, and cool. Cover with pie crust, in which several incisions have been made that there may be an outlet for escape of steam and gases. Wet edge of crust and put around a rim, having rim come close to edge. Bake in a moderate oven until crust is well risen and browned. Roll remnants of pastry and cut in diamond- shaped pieces, bake, and serve with pie when reheated. If puff paste is used, it is best to bake top separately.