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

Stuffed Peppers II.

268 · First Edition, 1896

Original 1896 Text

Stuffed Peppers II. Prepare peppers as for Stuffed Peppers I. Fill with equal parts of finely chopped cold cooked chicken or veal, and softened bread crumbs, seasoned with onion juice, salt, and pepper. Pumpkins are boiled or steamed same as squash, but require longer cooking. They are principally used for making pies. Radishes may be obtained throughout the year. There are round and long varieties, the small round ones being considered best. They are bought in bunches, six or seven constituting a bunch. Radishes are used merely for a relish, and are served uncooked. To prepare radishes for table, remove leaves, stems, and tip end of root, scrape roots, and serve on crushed ice. Round radishes look very attractive cut to imitate tulips, when they should not be scraped; to accomplish this, begin at root end and make six incisions through skin running three-fourths length of radish. Pass knife under sections of skin, and cut down as far as incisions extend. Place in cold water, and sections of skin will fold back, giving radish a tulip-like appearance. Spinach is cheapest and best in early summer, but is obtainable throughout the year. It gives variety to winter diet, when most green vegetables are expensive and of in- ferior quality.