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.

Hundreds
of recipes
Original
page scans
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.

Browse the book ↓

Want to make your own card from a photo, URL, or recipe text? Turn a recipe photo into a card.

Articles

Timing and reference page from the 1896 first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
History
How Fannie Farmer Standardized American Cooking

Why the 1896 first edition mattered, and how level measurements, sequenced method, and kitchen instruction traveled from the Boston Cooking School into ordinary recipe writing.

Read story
Portrait recipe card preview of Strawberry Short Cake I. from the Fannie Farmer collection
Preservation
From Historical Cookbook to Recipe Card

How a dense nineteenth-century cookbook page becomes a readable, source-linked card without quietly rewriting the historical record.

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Vegetables and potatoes

Boiled Potatoes.

277 · First Edition, 1896 · Report an issue

Ingredients

  • potatoes of uniform size
  • as needed cold water
  • one tablespoon for seven potatoes salt
  • as needed boiling water
  • one pint cold water

Method

  1. Select potatoes of uniform size.
  2. Wash, pare, and drop at once in cold water to prevent discoloration; soak one half-hour in the fall, and one to two hours in winter and spring.
  3. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, which is easily determined by piercing with a skewer.
  4. For seven potatoes allow one tablespoon salt, and boiling water to cover.
  5. Drain from water, and keep uncovered in warm place until serving time.
  6. Avoid sending to table in a covered vegetable dish.
  7. In boiling large potatoes, it often happens that outside is soft, while centre is underdone.
  8. To finish cooking without potatoes breaking apart, add one pint cold water, which drives heat to centre, thus accomplishing the cooking.

Original 1896 Text

potatoes of uniform size as needed cold water one tablespoon for seven potatoes salt as needed boiling water one pint cold water Select potatoes of uniform size. Wash, pare, and drop at once in cold water to prevent discoloration; soak one half-hour in the fall, and one to two hours in winter and spring. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, which is easily determined by piercing with a skewer. For seven potatoes allow one tablespoon salt, and boiling water to cover. Drain from water, and keep uncovered in warm place until serving time. Avoid sending to table in a covered vegetable dish. In boiling large potatoes, it often happens that outside is soft, while centre is underdone. To finish cooking without potatoes breaking apart, add one pint cold water, which drives heat to centre, thus accomplishing the cooking.

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