The Boston Cooking School Cookbooks

[David Ross]

Do you own an edition of "The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook," and do you cook from the original recipes in the book? I would be interested to know what edition you have and if you have ever cooked one of the recipes in the book. Or--have you adapted one of the original recipes using modern techniques and ingredients?

Two of my most cherished cookbooks, "The Boston Cooking-School Cookbooks," were written by Miss Fannie Merritt Farmer of "Miss Farmer's School of Cookery." The older cookbook was published in 1913 and the second has a publishing date of 1921. I believe our family has the original 1896 version somewhere in storage, but I'm not sure about that. If I find it I'll let you know.

The two vintage gems have been in my Mother's family ever since they were purchased new by my Great Grandmother Jenny Pink of Twin Falls, Idaho. When Jenny passed away, the cookbooks were left to her daughter, my Great Aunt Bertie Pink. When Aunt Bertie left us, Mother stored the cookbooks away and they were never opened for many years. It wasn't until I got older and discovered an interest in food and cooking, that I realized our family owned a valuable piece of cookbook history.

In the 1913 edition, Miss Farmer opens with an interesting quote from Ruskin that gives an insight into her thoughts on cookery in the early 20th century. The quote reads, in part..."Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in the meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your Grandmother's and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality....."

Quite prophetic words, and in many ways, still appropriate to the state of cuisine today.

The text and the recipes open a refreshing window on America's tastes over 95 years ago. Many of the recipes would find a welcome home on today's restaurant menus and would do doubt be as delicious today as they were back then.

I found two recipes that I wanted to share in the "Eggs" chapter. The first, a recipe for "Eggs a'la Livingstone," is an early version of an egg dish that would likely find a place on a restaurant menu today-foie gras and truffles seem to be as popular in 2008 as they were in 1913. The ingredients include:

4 eggs

1/2 cup stewed and strained tomatoes

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon paprika

2 tablespoons buter

Pate de foie gras

Finely chopped truffles

Toasted bread

The second egg recipe-"Omelette Robespierre," calls for sugar and vanilla in an omelette-at first glance an odd flavor combination, but one that could work-an omelette garnished with sugar caramelized by "a hot poker."

3 eggs

3 tablespoons hot water

1 tablespoon powdered sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

"Beat eggs slightly and add remaining ingredients. Put one and one-half tablespoons butter in a hot omelet pan, turn in mixture and cook same as French Omelete. Fold, turn on a hot platter, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and score with a hot poker."

Let me know your thoughts on the impact that Miss Farmer's works have had on the American kitchen and if you think there is value in revisiting some of the recipes from days gone by.

[Marigene]

My mother got an 1943 edition as a wedding shower gift and lost it due to a house fire in the early 70's, so I kept looking for a replacement for her. After finding one for her, I started collecting them.......

I have a dozen Boston Cooking School Cook Books 1906 through 1946. I also have The Boston Cook Book 1904 edition by Mary J. Lincoln.

The only recipe I use on a regualr basis is for the peanut butter and marshmallow fudge (page 711 in the 1943 edition). My mother always made that fudge and it is the best, as far as I am concerned!

[David Ross]

My mother got an 1943 edition as a wedding shower gift and lost it due to a house fire in the early 70's, so I kept looking for a replacement for her. After finding one for her, I started collecting them.......

I have a dozen Boston Cooking School Cook Books 1906 through 1946. I also have The Boston Cook Book 1904 edition by Mary J. Lincoln.

The only recipe I use on a regualr basis is for the peanut butter and marshmallow fudge (page 711 in the 1943 edition). My mother always made that fudge and it is the best, as far as I am concerned!

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Thanks! What a collection you have. That 1904 edition is to be cherished.

I'll have to try some of the candy recipes. I wonder if your Mother was like my Mother and Grandmother when it came to making fudge--they would never make fudge on a rainy day--I think they thought the humidty on a rainy day would prevent the sugar from cooking properly. In those days they made fudge the old-fashioned way by cooking the sugar and never used marshmallow cream.

[momcook]

You can read and view the 1896 edition on line:

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/

This is a great resource for old and unique cookbooks.

[David Ross]

You can read and view the 1896 edition on line:

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/

This is a great resource for old and unique cookbooks.

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Wow, thank you. I'd encourage everyone who doesn't own a hard copy of one of Fannie Farmer's cookbooks to check out this wonderful website.

[Adam Balic]

I've made the Boston Baked Beans recipe from the 1896 edition. Rather different to the modern recipe I imagine.

[Kerry Beal]

Mine is 1945. Paid 50 cents for it.

It's a great reference when I'm looking for 'classic' recipes. Mostly the candy and baking recipes call out to me.

[MaxH]

The "Boston Cooking School" Cookbook, popularly called the "Fannie Farmer" for generations, was the leading introductory and general-purpose US cookbook from the early 1900s through maybe the peak of its influence in the 1950s and 60s. It receded I think in importance with the explosion of new and even mainstream cookbook titles (deSablon tosses off a dramatic statistic about that in her book). After some hiatus, a sort of revival edition appeared a few years ago under a "Fannie Farmer" title. All of this I gathered from reading countless 20th-century references to the book, and my own observations about it since the 1960s. (I've had the very popular 1965 edition at hand for decades, and I have the 1921. The book was used in my family in the San Francisco Bay area since the 19-teens or earlier.)

Popular competition appeared eventually in the form of the Rombauers' Joy of Cooking (especially in the 1943 edition) although the competing books had different styles and histories. The Rombauers' started as an informal set of Midwestern family recipes from canned food, and was almost completely reworked in each of multiple major revisions. The Fannie Farmer took a much more systematic, almost obsessively "scientific" approach especially in the early editions I've read. Neither title had the influence in its time of the great US 19th-century cookbooks (by Mary Randolph and especially Eliza Leslie) -- discussed in various threads here -- but all four are regarded together (and displayed in the Copia food-wine history museum as) the principal four popular US cookbooks of the last 200 years.

The Fannie Farmer has gotten some telling criticism. I don't offhand know any that's harsher than the chapter it occupies in the Hesses' unsparing 1977 critique The Taste of America. Whatever factors promoted the revision in US popular cooking sensibility through most of the 20th century, away from fresh seasonal ingredients, and sensitivity to quality; away from learning to cook from previous generations to learning to cook from cookbooks -- the Fannie Farmer symbolized these shifts to the Hesses. (Much of the renaissance in US popular and restaurant cooking, just beginning when the Hesses wrote, is a reversal of those trends, a rediscovery of older cooking wisdoms.) However, when I look at the early-20th-century Fannie Farmer editions, I don't see quite the Puritanical suppression of flavor and enjoyment you might expect if you read only the Hesses' account. It's true that the cookbooks' tone leans to the severe and utilitarian, but flashes of life and joy and ancient or cosmopolitan insight are there too.