Chapter 16
Fannie’s Last Word
From 1905 to 1910, Fannie directed the cooking section of the Women’s Home Companion. She also started to travel more widely, visiting the West Coast, St. Louis, and Texas. Fannie suffered two strokes in later years and was confined to a wheelchair, but she was still lecturing in the last weeks of her life, both at her cooking school and at women’s clubs. She even spoke at Harvard, where she focused on the relationship between diet and health (and was also the first woman lecturer at the medical school); she was especially interested in controlling diabetes. Her last book, Food and Cooking for the Sick and Convalescent, sold poorly and soon went out of print. She died in January 1915 of Bright’s disease, although some said that she died of arteriosclerosis, an ironic coincidence since she was considered an expert on the subject of a healthy diet.
Her ashes are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, in very good company with many of the great families of Boston. After her death, Alice Bradley, a cooking-school teacher herself, purchased the school from Fannie’s sister Cora and became its principal. She soon added classes for professionals who wanted to open tearooms or restaurants and, in 1916, also became cooking editor for the Woman’s Home Companion. In 1944, she sold the school to Dr. Dana Wallace and died two years later, in 1946. Fannie’s sister Cora took over the editing of the The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook until 1929, at which point Wilma Lord Perkins (wife of Fannie’s nephew, Dexter Perkins), with “no background in cooking whatsoever,” assumed control and went on to revise the cookbook seven more times, as well as authoring The Fannie Farmer Junior Cookbook in 1940. The cookbook went on to sell over 4 million copies by the 1960s.
Fannie’s estate came to close to $200,000, a vast sum at the time. She had invested in utilities and railroads and also owned real estate, including a parcel of land out in Harvard, where she had started construction on a country home just before her death. It was completed in 1916, and two of her descendants, her nephew Dexter Perkins and his wife Wilma, spent much time there in the summers and later named it Weldon. (The house has nine bedrooms and formal gardens; much of the furniture came from Fannie’s home in Boston.)
Much later, Frank Benson, the president of Fanny Farmer Candy Shops, bought the rights to the book and sold the idea of an entirely new revision to Alfred A. Knopf. (Oddly enough, Fanny Farmer candies had nothing to do with Fannie herself. Frank O’Connor, a Canadian candy maker, founded his company in 1919 and named it after Fannie Farmer as a marketing ploy, changing the name slightly, one would assume, to avoid legal troubles. The first Fanny Farmer shop was opened in Rochester, New York, although it soon specialized in mail-order delivery.) James Beard recommended Marion Cunningham, an associate, who spent four years working on a complete revision, which was published in 1979.
Just two months before her death, on November 18, 1914, Fannie demonstrated the cooking of Thanksgiving dinner. An extant copy of the printed lesson from the day, printed with the heading “Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery,” offered ten recipes in paragraph form, including Thanksgiving Cocktail (parboiled oysters served in the shell with seasoned oyster liquor), Roast Turkey, Giblet Stuffing, Scalloped Salsify, Toasted Crackled Corn Bread, Cranberry Fluff (cooked, sweetened cranberries folded into beaten egg whites and briefly baked), Cider Frappé (a cider jelly), Newport Salad, Plum Pudding, and Brandy Sauce. The margins of the menu are packed with a student’s corrections and notations, the printed recipe offering 1½ cups flour rather than the correct ½ cup bread flour penned in the margin. In addition, there are notes filling in information that was not included in the recipe itself, such as how much poultry seasoning to use, the specific recipe for a French dressing, or a small drawing indicating how to assemble a Newport salad. Up until the very end, Fannie Farmer was a dedicated, enthusiastic teacher.
Fannie was not a food lover in the modern sense. Health trumped pleasure; science overrode taste. She admitted that she was first and foremost a businesswoman and a lecturer, rather than an inspired cook. And yet, no other figure from the nineteenth century helped shaped the landscape of American cooking so dramatically in the next. She combined scientific method married to a keen eye for what would sell, for what the public wanted. In other words, Fannie was businesslike both in her approach to recipe development and in her approach to selling herself to the public. This, then, is the enduring legacy of our culinary past: a keen sense of the marketplace, the science of food overriding the passion and pleasure of dining, and the entire package neatly wrapped in a public persona who perfectly captivated the attention of her age. This is the story of America, of our success and also our fatal weakness, seeing the shape of a thing rather than its ephemeral center, ignoring the soul for how the bones fit together, marching forward with our eyes wide open rather than closing them a moment to savor the pure pleasure of a first bite. Fannie always asked about a recipe, “Could it be better?” One wonders if she ever took a spoonful of blanc mange or bisque, sat back, smiled, and said happily, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”