Recipes from Boston: Fannie Farmer and the Redefinition of American Cookery

There are cookbooks, and then there is Fannie Merritt Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. This mammoth and monumental tome, published in 1896 by Little, Brown, and Company, quite literally redefined cookery and cookbooks for the twentieth century. In both its presentation and its thinking about food, it was the first truly modern cookbook. Fannie Farmer, furthermore, spread New England tastes and New England cookery across the country, doing so with flair and a passion for food unrivaled by most cooks of her day. 

Fannie Farmer rose to culinary prominence unexpectedly. Although driven and intelligent, she was stricken by polio while in high school in Medford, Massachusetts, making her bedridden through most of her twenties. Through perseverance, she relearned to walk, and, at 31, she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School, a training academy for what was then called “the household arts and sciences.” Unlike those who enrolled in the school simply to become better housewives, Farmer was a quizzical culinarian. Her love for food paid real dividends: she became principal of the cooking school within a decade of her enrollment as a student. A previous president, Mary Lincoln, had written the school’s cooking text in 1884, calling it Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book.  The Boston Cooking School charged its new principal with revising the book. Fannie Farmer invested her own life savings to make sure that Little, Brown, and Company—one of the country’s most respected publishing houses—printed her new book.

Fannie Farmer’s culinary greatness was unforeseen, so, too, was The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book’s national success. The work unexpectedly became the great disseminator of a decade of innovations and breakthrough in nutritional understandings about food, understandings that most home cooks of the era knew little about. In the generation before its publication, nutritional scientists had created the framework for the way food affects the body that Americans still use today. Before this time, most people differentiated little between the foods they consumed.  All foods were fuel, and while certain types provided certain benefits, most believed that the total weight of food eaten represented the most important aspect of food consumption. Guided by the efforts of German scientist Justus von Liebig, however, scientists began categorizing and compartmentalizing elements in particular foods that worked in different ways in human bodies. Researchers in this period, the most prominent Americans being Edward Atkinson, Wilbur Atwater, and Ellen Richards (a close confidant of Fannie Farmer), created concepts such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins to help explain what particular kinds of food did in the body. In telling her readers about these subjects, Farmer acknowledged that “During the last decade, much time has been given by scientists to the study of foods and their dietetic value, and it is a subject which rightfully should demand much consideration from all.” It is her wish, she continued, that the cookbook “may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.”

At the same time, Fannie Farmer’s book introduced its readers to the then-novel idea of using and embracing standardized measurements and recipes. Through most of the nineteenth century, traditional knowledge and trained taste buds helped cooks craft pleasing dishes, not measurements involving tablespoons, cups, ounces, or pounds. Outside of a few circles, precise measurements were nearly unknown.  Manufacturers of kitchen equipment, for instance, did not start producing standardized cups and spoons until the 1880s.  For Farmer, and others in her culinary circle, standardized measurements and recipes were the two foundations of good cooking. “Current measurements are absolutely necessary to insure (sic) the best results,” she tried to persuade her readers. “Good judgment, with experience, has taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides.” To this day, Fannie Farmer is often called “The Mother of Level Measurements.”

New scientific ideas and precise measurements are only part of what makes The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book such a significant contribution to American culinary history. Living in Boston, Fannie Farmer had access to one of the largest food markets and most refined food cultures in the world, and the text reflects this. Its culinary cosmopolitanism is striking compared with other late-nineteenth-century cookbooks. Recipes for consommé and oyster gumbo shared the pages with Indian curry and stuffed lobster with béchamel; Farmer even included recipes from Delmonico’s in New York City, then the country’s most famous restaurant. These cosmopolitan concoctions complemented other recipes that were clear reflections of New England’s rural heritage.  Instructions for Indian pudding (essentially a corn mush), forcemeats, and dozens of recipes for griddlecakes (for those that still cooked over a hearth) balanced these fancier urban dishes, making the book more approachable for home cooks in the countryside who did not have the same access to ingredients as those who lived in cities on the eastern seaboard.  More importantly, with the marketing and distribution network controlled by Little, Brown, and Company, the book made its way to the hand’s of women across the country. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, then, was the first American regional cookbook to have a national impact on taste.

Little, Brown, and Company printed only 2,000 copies in the book’s first run. By the time of Fannie Farmer’s death in 1915, the book had sold 360,000 copies, and its sales were increasing annually. The book proved to publishers that cookbooks could make mass-market best sellers, and it proved to many cooks that standardized measurements, scientific ideals, and New England cookery should have a place in every American home.