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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Beef

Dried Beef with Cream.

189 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Dried Beef with Cream. ¼ lb. smoked dried beef, thinly sliced. 1 cup scalded cream. 1½ tablespoons flour. Remove skin and separate meat in pieces, cover with hot water, let stand ten minutes, and drain. Dilute flour with enough cold water to pour easily, making a smooth paste; add to cream, and cook in double boiler ten minutes. Add beef, and reheat. One cup White Sauce I. may be used in place of cream. LAMB is the name given to the meat of lambs; mutton, to the meat of sheep. Lamb, coming as it does from the young creature, is immature, and less nutritious than mutton. The flesh of mutton ranks with the flesh of beef in nutritive value and digestibility. The fat of mutton, on account of its larger percentage of stearic acid, is more difficult of digestion than the fat of beef. Lamb may be eaten soon after the animal is killed and dressed; mutton must hang to ripen. Good mutton comes from a sheep about three years old, and should hang from two to three weeks. The English South Down Mutton is cut from creatures even older than three years. Young lamb, when killed from six weeks to three months old, is called spring lamb, and appears in the market as early as the last of January, but is very scarce until March. Lamb one year old is called a yearling. Many object to the strong flavor of mutton; this is greatly overcome by re- moving the pink skin and trimming off superfluous fat. Lamb and mutton are divided into two parts by cutting through entire length of backbone; then subdivided into fore and hind quarter, eight ribs being left on hind-quar- ter,-while in beef but three ribs are left on hind-quarter. These eight ribs are cut into chops and are known as rib chops. The meat which lies between these ribs and the leg, cut into chops, is known as loin or kidney chops. Lamb and mutton chops cut from loin have a small piece of tenderloin on one side of bone, and correspond to porter- house steaks in the beef creature. Rib chops which have 1. Hind-quarter of veal. 2. Hind-quarter of lamb. the bone cut short and scraped clean, nearly to the lean meat, are called French chops. The leg is sold whole for boiling or roasting. The fore- quarter may be boned, stuffed, rolled, and roasted, but is more often used for broth, stew, or fricassee. For a saddle of mutton the loin is removed whole before splitting the creature. Some of bones are removed and the flank ends are rolled, fastened with wooden skewers, and securely tied to keep skewers in place. Good quality mutton should be fine-grained and of bright pink color; the fat white, hard, and flaky. If the outside skin comes off easily, mutton is sure to be good. Lamb chops may be easily distinguished from mutton chops by the red color of bone. As lamb grows older, blood recedes frombones; therefore in mutton the bone is white. In leg of lamb the bone at joint is serrated, while in leg of mutton the bone at joint is smooth and rounded. Good mutton contains a larger proportion of fat thangood beef. Poor mutton is often told by the relatively small proportion of fat and lean as compared to bone. Lamb is usually preferred well done; mutton is often cooked rare.