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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Poultry and game

Spanish Sauce.

235 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Spanish Sauce. Melt one-fourth cup butter, add one tablespoon finely chopped onion, a stalk of celery, two slices carrot cut in pieces, and two tablespoons finely chopped lean raw ham. Cook until butter is brown, then add one-fourth cup flour, and when well browned add two cups Consommé, bit of bay leaf, sprig of parsley, blade of mace, two cloves, one-half teaspoon salt, and one-eighth teaspoon pepper; cook five minutes. Strain, add duck, and when reheated add sherry wine, stoned olives, and mushrooms cut in quarters. Arrange on dish for serving, and garnish with olives and mushrooms. Grouse may be used in place of duck. THE French chef keeps always on hand four sauces,—White, Brown, Béchamel, and Tomato,—and with these as a basis is able to make kinds innumerable. Butter and flour are usually cooked together for thickening sauces. When not browned, it is called roux; when browned, brown roux. The French mix butter and flour together, put in saucepan, place over fire, stir for five minutes; set aside to cool, again place over fire, and add liquid, stirring constantly until thick and smooth. Butter and flour for brown sauces are cooked together much longer, and watched carefully lest butter should burn. The American cook makes sauce by stirring butter in saucepan until melted and bubbling, adds flour and continues stirring, then adds liquid, gradually stirring or beating until the boiling point is reached. For Brown Sauce, butter should be stirred until well browned; flour should be added and stirred with butter until both are browned before the addition of liquid. The secret in making a Brown Sauce is to have butter and flour well browned before adding liquid. It is well worth remembering that a sauce of average thickness is made by allowing two tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup liquid, whether it be milk, stock, or tomato. For Brown Sauce a slightly larger quantity of flour is necessary, as by browning flour its thickening property is lessened, its starch being changed to dextrine. When sauces are set away, put a few bits of butter on top to prevent crust from forming.