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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Vegetables and potatoes

Spinach à la Béchamel.

269 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Spinach à la Béchamel. Prepare one-half peck Boiled Spinach. Put three ta- blespoons butter in hot omelet pan; when melted, add chopped spinach, cook three minutes. Sprinkle with two tablespoons flour, stir thoroughly, and add gradually three- fourths cup milk; cook five minutes. Summer squash, which are in market during the summer months, should be young, tender, and thin skinned. The common varieties are the white round and yellow crook- neck. Some of the winter varieties appear in market as early as the middle of August; among the most common are Marrow, Turban, and Hubbard. Turban and Hubbard are usually drier than Marrow. Marrow and Turban have a thin shell, which may be pared off before cooking. Hubbard Squash has a very hard shell, which must be split in order to separate squash in pieces, and squash then cooked in the shell. In selecting winter squash, see that it is heavy in proportion to its size.