Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook (episode 159)

Just in time for your fantasies about the perfect Thanksgiving meal, we’re going to introduce you to Boston’s matriarch of modern cooking this week. You probably thought that Julia Child was Greater Boston’s original top chef, but a generation before Julia launched her career, Fannie Farmer published a cookbook that revolutionized the way that recipes are presented, made cooking accessible to the average home maker, and put Boston at the center of kitchens across the nation.

As a side note, your humble hosts moved this weekend, so this episode will be on the shorter side, but we hope to be back next week in full force.


Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook

Boston Book Club

Many of you probably have guests who will be visiting Boston this holiday season. It can be hard to find a walking tour in November and December, but on a mild day it is the perfect season to explore historic Boston. The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail by Charles Bahne is our go-to for the Freedom Trail. It provides detailed walking instructions and just the right amount of history and context at each stop. It’s small enough to carry in a coat pocket, and if you order it right away, you can study up to impress your friends and family. 

If you embark on the trail, you’ll want to make a few stops along the way to warm up. We recommend Boston Cream Pie at the Omni Parker House, a cup of chowder at the Union Oyster House, and a hearty lunch at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown. All of these sites are uniquely historic with delicious menus. 

Upcoming Event

On Monday, December 16, experience one of the best ways to be part of Boston’s revolutionary history. Practice your colonial insults and curses for the annual Boston Tea Party Reenactment hosted by Old South Meeting House and the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

The event website describes the evening:

It’s December 16th, and trouble is brewing in Boston. Join us to travel back in time and relive one of the most iconic public protests in American history– the Boston Tea Party!

First, gather at Old South Meeting House, the actual historic landmark where the colonists met in 1773, with Boston’s infamous rabblerousers like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere– and even some crown-loving Loyalists– to debate the tea tax and demand liberty from the British crown. Then, join the fife and drum led procession to Griffin’s Wharf, and line the shores of Boston Harbor with scores of colonists to “Huzzah!” the Sons of Liberty as they storm the Brig Beaver and toss that troublesome tea into the icy waters below!

The event schedule is as follows:

  • 6:30pm “Meeting of The Body of the People” (TICKET REQUIRED) Ticket holders join an authentic, spirited, and theatrical colonial meeting at Old South Meeting House to protest the colonial tax on tea, just as unprecedented numbers of colonists gathered in this very building 245 years ago. (INSIDE PERFORMANCE REQUIRES TICKET) 

  • 6:30pm “Friends! Brethren! Countrymen!” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC)As the town meeting rages inside of Old South Meeting House, join the crowds outside and hear from a Town Crier and the women of Colonial Boston as they discuss news of this tea crisis. (OUTSIDE PERFORMANCE FREE TO THE PUBLIC)

  • 7:30pm “Huzzah for Griffin’s Wharf” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC; TICKET HOLDERS GET PRIME PLACEMENT) Led by fife & drum corps, we’ll parade through the Financial District of Boston and down to the Waterfront where Griffin’s Wharf once stood. We’ll follow same route the original Patriots walked to Boston Harbor to destroy the tea! 

  • 8:00pm “Boston Harbor, A Teapot Tonight!” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC; TICKET HOLDERS GET GUARANTEED VIEWING) Stand side-by-side with the colonists as we line the shores of Boston Harbor. We’ll “Huzzah!” as the Sons of Liberty storm aboard the Brig Beaver to destroy chest after chest of East India Company Tea.

Advanced registration is required for the ticketed portion of the event, and tickets cost $30.

Transcript

[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston. The Hub of the Universe.
This is Episode 1 59 Fannie Farmers Cookbook. Hi, I’m Nikki.
This week, we’re talking about Boston’s matriarch of modern cooking.
Foodies may be quick to assume that Julia Child is greater Boston’s original top chef.
But decades before Julia launched her career, Fannie Farmer published a cookbook that revolutionized the way that recipes are presented and made cooking accessible to the average homemaker.
But before we talk about tablespoons and clam frappes, it’s time for this week’s Boston Book Club selection and their upcoming historical event.
And as a side note, Jake and I are moving this week, so this episode will be on the shorter side, but we hope that next week we’ll be back in full force.

[0:58] Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail by Charles Bond.
Many of you probably have guests who will be visiting Boston this holiday season.
It’s hard to find a walking tour in November and December, but on a mild day, it’s a wonderful time to explore the city.
This book is our go to for the Freedom Trail. It provides detailed walking instructions and just the right amount of content. At each stop.
It’s small enough to carry it, and if you order it right away, you can definitely study up and impress your friends and family.
If you embark on the trail, you’ll want to make a few stops along the way to warm up, we recommend Boston cream Pie at the Omni Parker House, a cup of chowder at the Union Oyster House and a hearty lunch at the Warren Tavern and Charles Stone.
All of these sites are uniquely historic, with delicious menus.

[1:50] And for upcoming event this week, we’re featuring Old South Meeting House and the Boston Tea Party. Ships and museums Annual Boston Tea Party reenactment on Monday, December 16th.
It’s one of the best ways to experience Boston’s revolutionary history and a great excuse to bust out your colonial insults and curses.
The event website describes the evening as such. It’s December 16th and trouble is brewing in Boston.
Join us to travel back in time and relive one of the most iconic public protests in American history.
The Boston Tea Party first gather our old South meeting house,
the actual historic landmark where the colonists met in 17 73 with Boston’s infamous rabble rousers like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, and even some crown loving loyalists,
to debate the tea tax and demand Liberty from the British crown,
then joined the fife and drum lead procession to Griffin’s Worf and line the shores of Boston Harbor with scores of colonists to shout his ah to the Sons of Liberty as they storm the big beaver and toss that troublesome tea into the icy waters below.

[2:58] The event schedule is as follows meaning of the body of the people will be held at 6:30 p.m. And tickets are required.
Ticketholders join unauthentic spirited and theatrical Colonial Meeting at Old South Meeting House to protest the Colonial tax on tea Just as unprecedented numbers of colonists gathered in this very building 245 years ago.

[3:20] Friends, Brethren, countrymen free to the public at 6:30 p.m.
As the town meeting rages inside of Old South meeting house joined the crowds outside and hear from a town crier and the women of Colonial Boston as they discuss news of this tea crisis,
at 7 30 PM, has offer Griffin’s Worf.
This portion of the event is also free to the public. The ticket holders do get prime placement, led by Fife and Drum Corps, will parade through the Financial district of Boston and down to the waterfront where Griffin’s Worf once stood.
We’ll follow the same route. The original Patriots walked to Boston Harbor to destroy the tea.

[4:02] And then at 8 p.m. Stand side by side with the colonists as we line the shores of Boston Harbor.
Will his are as the sons of Liberty Storm aboard the Big Beaver to destroy chest after chest of East India Company T.
We’ll include a link with more details in this week’s show notes, and now it’s time for this week’s main top.

[4:24] Fannie Farmer was born in Boston on March 23rd 18 57.
She had the good fortune to be born into a family that valued education for her and the three sisters that followed.
She was on a trajectory towards college, but she suffered what was referred to as a paralytic stroke but was perhaps polio at the age of 16 while attending Medford High School,
the devastating event derailed her formal academic education.
For several years, she was unable to walk and remain in her parents care at home.
During this time, Fannie took up cooking, eventually turning her mother’s home into a boarding house that developed a reputation for the quality of the meals. It sir.

[5:07] Eventually, Fannie regained the ability to walk, though with a pronounced limp at the age of 30.
In 18 87 she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School.
The school was founded nine years earlier in 18 79 by the Women’s Educational Association of Boston,
to offer instruction and cooking to those who wish to earn their livelihood as cooks or who would make practical use of such information in their families.

[5:35] The idea for the school was first proposed by association member Sara E. Hooper, who had observed the teaching at London’s National School of Cooker.
She persuaded the association to authorize $100 to launch a similar school in Boston, and the Boston Cooking School opened its doors at 1 58 and 1/2 Tree Mont St.
Which I believe is by Boston Common, where the movie theater is located. Today.
The first teacher was Joanna Sweeney, who was engaged to teach the normal classes in basic cooking after Mary Lincoln turned down the job because, in her words, I refused to consider the proposition.
For while I knew that I could cook, I knew nothing about cooking schools.
This matter was dropped, and Miss Joanna Sweeney was engaged as a teacher and no, not that Mary Lincoln,
tuition was purposefully kept low at a dollar 50 for six lessons to cater to upper class women and their cooks.
Maria Parlow was engaged to give lectures and demonstrations of more advanced cookery on alternate Saturdays.
In addition to unrolling women who sought education on how to better cook for their families, the school gave women an entry into respectable professional work at a time when more women needed employment,
whether they were born into families with limited means or were the wives of successful men who had lost their fortunes.

[7:00] In November 18 79 Mary Lincoln was offered the opportunity to take lessons from Ms Sweeney and attend the public demonstration lectures by Maria Parla,
after which she would be hired to teach for six months at a salary of $75 per month.
She later wrote. This was a most generous offer, and I felt that if others had so much confidence in me, I certainly ought to be willing to try, and I consented to take the school a month on trial.
She continued at the school until 18 85 eventually becoming its first principle.
She inaugurated a wide variety of special courses and lectures, ranging from free courses for immigrant girls in Boston’s North End to special instruction in sick room cookery for nurses from area hospitals.
Fannie Farmer trained at the school until 18 89 during the height of the domestic service movement,
learning what were then considered the most critical elements of the science, including nutrition and diet, techniques of cleaning and sanitation, chemical analysis of food,
techniques of cooking and baking, and household management.
Farmer was considered one of the school’s top students. Upon graduating, she was kept on as an assistant to the director, and in 18 91 she took the position of school principal.

[8:22] A mere five years later, Fannie Farmer revolutionized the act of cooking with the publication of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, which later became known simply as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
In the preface, she writes, cookery means the knowledge of Medea and Search, See, and of Helen and the Queen of Sheba.
It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bombs and spices, and all of it is healing and sweet in the fields of groves and savory and 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.
And in fine it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies loaf givers.

[9:19] But for life, the universe were nothing, and all that has life requires nourishment with the progress of knowledge.
The needs of the human body have not been forgotten 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.
I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one’s education,
then mankind will eat toe live, will be able to do better mental and physical work and disease will be less frequent.

[9:59] At the earnest solicitation of educators, pupils and friends.
I have been urged to prepare this book, and I trust it may be a help to many who need its aid.
It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest throughout its condensed scientific knowledge, which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.

[10:25] Toe. Understand the impact of this cookbook.
It’s important to consider what Victorian recipes lacked.
The measurements were like my grandmother’s, a handful of flour, a sprinkle of salt, a good amount of butter.
Recipes also often assume that the reader had a good baseline knowledge already and might begin with make a pie crust to move cooking forward. As a science, Fannie Farmer popularized standard measurements, she explained.
Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to ensure the best results.
Good judgment with experience has taught some to measure by sight, but the majority need definite guides.

[11:06] As a follow up to the earlier Mrs Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook, published by Mary Lincoln in 18 84,
This book under Farmers Direction, eventually contained 1850 recipes from milk toast to Klamm frappes.
And if you are curious, you, too, can make a clam frappe by washing 20 clams thoroughly changing the water several times, putting them in a stew pan with 1/2 a cup of cold water, covering and steaming until the shells open.
You then strain the liquor. Cool and freeze it to a bush.
You would serve this in place of your soup course, obviously.

[11:46] Fannie Farmers New York Times obituary explains how her version of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook stood apart from Mary Lincoln’s.

[11:56] Earlier books, including previous editions of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, assumed that all women were taught basic culinary skills at home and that they did not need to be told what pie crust should feel like or how to roast beef.
But much of that changed after the Industrial Revolution. Traditional skills like preserving cheesemaking and bread making ebbed, and Boston and other cities became magnets for new kinds of Americans,
single women, young people and immigrant families all in need of homes, jobs and food.

[12:31] Fannie also included essays on housekeeping cleaning, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, and nutritional information.
The book’s publisher, Little Brown and Company, did not predict good sales and limited the first addition to 3000 copies published at the author’s expense.
Given the low expectations, she was able to retain the copyright.
This proved to be wise, as the book was so popular in America, so thorough and so comprehensive that cooks would refer to later editions simply as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and it’s still available in print today.

[13:09] Farmer provided scientific explanations of the chemical processes that occur in food during cooking and also helped to standardize the system of measurements used in cooking in the U. S.
Before the cookbooks publication. Other American recipes frequently called for amounts such as a piece of butter the size of an egg or a tea cup of milk.
Farmers. Systemic discussion of measurement. A cupful is a measured level.
A table spoonful is a measured level.
A tea spoonful is a measured level led to her being named the mother of level measurements.
The Library of Congress Web archives contains a brief biography that details Fanny’s post Boston cooking school decades in 19 0 to Farmer resigned her position.
Tau open Miss Farmer School of Cookery.
Though she placed greater emphasis on teaching housewives in society women than training women to earn a living.
She eventually focused on the subject of healthy diets for the sick and diseased.
She trained hospital dieticians and nurses and gave regular lectures at the Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Elliot P. Josslyn, the medical pioneer and diabetes research and treatment, knew of farmers work and cited her in a letter dated just days before his death as the stimulus, which started me in writing about diabetes.

[14:37] In 1904 Farmer published what she considered her most important work and upon which she thought her reputation would rest food and cookery for the sick and convalescent.
Dedicated to her mother and intended for mothers and trained nurses alike, the book takes its epigraph from Florence Nightingale.
A good sick cook will save the digestion half its work.
The cookbook begins like a treatise with chapters on the classification, composition, nutritional value and digestibility of foods, including a discussion of the digestive system.
It covers infant feeding, endorsing breastfeeding and stating that many impoverished children would not survive on bottle feeding,
children’s diets, the use of alcohol, how to prepare a large variety of common foods and diets for specific diseases, including a remarkable chapter and diabetes.
Overall, the book reveals farmers touching intimacy and sympathy for the invalids needs something she knew firsthand.
The invalid stray should be orderly, cheerful and with small portions in dainty china.
Ah, heart shaped bread and butter sandwich will be eaten when the slice of bread and ball of butter would not, she writes.
Men and women are certainly but children of an older growth, which fact is especially emphasized during times of sickness and suffering.

[16:02] For the rest of her years, Farmer maintained at her cooking school, holding weekly lectures that were well attended and widely reported in the press and lecturing to women’s clubs throughout the country, always testing and inventing new recipes.
She would attend top restaurants in Boston. In New York, Tau learn new dishes if her talent to analyze a flavor failed to identify a certain taste, and the chef refused to reveal his secret.
She would reportedly take a sample back to the Cookie School laboratory to analyze further.
She wrote many cookbooks and pamphlets and in the last 10 years of her life, wrote and edited a cookery page for Women’s Home Companion with the help of her sister, Cora Dexter Farmer Perkins.
In her last years, she suffered two strokes and needed to use a wheelchair, but she continued to lecture up until 10 days before her death, she died in Boston, and her ashes were buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge.
Her school continued, led by Alice Bradley until it’s closing in 1944.

[17:08] As you work through your holiday shopping list, consider the Fannie Farmer Cookbook for that person you know who loves to try a new recipe.
He or she will be among good company as the New York Times obituary includes the following endorsement.
Julia Child, one of the only American cooks to become a CZ widely influential a CE farmer,
said that the Boston Cooking School Cookbook was the primary reference in her own mother’s kitchen and that she cut her teeth as a cook on its pancakes, pop overs and fudge recipes.
Both women were famous as teachers and writers, not as brilliant cooks.
Child and farmer were considered unusual in their time. Both were ambitious, charismatic media titans,
purveyors of domestic wisdom who led unconventional domestic lives and privileged women from old New England families with a strong sense of how things ought to be done.

[18:03] Toe. Learn more about Fannie Farmer in her cookbook, Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 159,
We’ll have links to a few recipes, an episode of the documents that change the world podcast that features the cookbook Mary Lincoln’s Good Housekeeping article and of course a link to purchase the cookbook.

[18:24] We’ll have links to information about our upcoming event and The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail, this week’s Boston Book Club pick.
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Nikki:
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That’s all for now. We’ll be back next time to talk about the song Over the river and through the Woods, which started out as a Thanksgiving Carol with Boston roots.

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