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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Cold desserts

Jellied Prunes.

353 · First Edition, 1896

Ingredients

  • ½ box gelatine or 2½ tablespoons granulated
  • gelatine.
  • 1 cup sugar.
  • ¼ cup lemon juice.

Method

  1. Pick over, wash, and soak prunes for several hours in two cups cold water, and cook in same water until soft;
  2. remove prunes; stone, and cut in quarters.
  3. To prune
  4. water add enough boiling water to make two cups.
  5. Soak
  6. gelatine in half-cup cold water, dissolve in hot liquid, add
  7. sugar, lemon juice, then strain, add prunes, mould, and chill.
  8. Stir twice while cooling to prevent prunes from settling.
  9. Serve with sugar and cream.

Original 1896 Text

Jellied Prunes. ½ box gelatine or 2½ tablespoons granulated gelatine. 1 cup sugar. ¼ cup lemon juice. Pick over, wash, and soak prunes for several hours in two cups cold water, and cook in same water until soft; remove prunes; stone, and cut in quarters. To prune water add enough boiling water to make two cups. Soak gelatine in half-cup cold water, dissolve in hot liquid, add sugar, lemon juice, then strain, add prunes, mould, and chill. Stir twice while cooling to prevent prunes from settling. Serve with sugar and cream.