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.

Hundreds
of recipes
Original
page scans
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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Articles

Timing and reference page from the 1896 first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
History
How Fannie Farmer Standardized American Cooking

Why the 1896 first edition mattered, and how level measurements, sequenced method, and kitchen instruction traveled from the Boston Cooking School into ordinary recipe writing.

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Current live Strawberry Short Cake I. recipe view from the Fannie Farmer collection
Preservation
From Historical Cookbook to Recipe Card

How a dense nineteenth-century cookbook page becomes a readable, source-linked card without quietly rewriting the historical record.

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Fish and shellfish

Planked Shad or Whitefish.

138 · First Edition, 1896 · Report an issue

Ingredients

  • three-pound shad or whitefish
  • to taste salt
  • to taste pepper
  • to brush melted butter
  • to garnish parsley
  • to garnish lemon

Method

  1. Clean and split a three-pound shad.
  2. Put skin side down on an oak plank one inch thick, and a little longer and wider than the fish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush over with melted butter.
  3. Bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven.
  4. Remove from oven, spread with butter, and garnish with parsley and lemon.
  5. The fish should be sent to the table on plank.
  6. Planked Shad is well cooked in a gas range having the flame over the fish.
  7. The Planked Whitefish of the Great Lakes has gained much favor.

Kitchen Notes

  • Original calls for a hot oven — about 400°F.

Original 1896 Text

three-pound shad or whitefish to taste salt to taste pepper to brush melted butter to garnish parsley to garnish lemon Clean and split a three-pound shad. Put skin side down on an oak plank one inch thick, and a little longer and wider than the fish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush over with melted butter. Bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven. Remove from oven, spread with butter, and garnish with parsley and lemon. The fish should be sent to the table on plank. Planked Shad is well cooked in a gas range having the flame over the fish. The Planked Whitefish of the Great Lakes has gained much favor.

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