Chapter 3
Fannie Farmer Is Born, Survives Polio, Takes Over the Boston Cooking School, and Sells Over 360,000 Copies of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Who was Fannie Merritt Farmer? Was she a cook first and a teacher second, or was she perhaps more promoter than culinary wizard? For starters, she was middle-class at best, and her view of the world, one that evidently suited her audience at the time, was parochial and narrow. To tart up a recipe, she would simply give it an ersatz French name to lend an aura of adventure and good living. Recipes such as Gâteau de Princesse Louise or Potage à la Reine fall into this category. In her worst moments, more Food Network than serious cooking school, she invented cloying recipe names such as Heart’s-Ache Pudding for Valentine’s Day. In fact, Fannie understood, much like any modern food celebrity, that food is, in large part, entertainment. The fact that Fannie herself was not well traveled or particularly sophisticated mattered not a whit, since her audience was even less urbane than she was. To truly appreciate her marketing and packaging skills, one need only look at the origins of the Boston Cooking School, in which she would turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.
The Women’s Education Association was a post–Civil War institution founded by reformers and philanthropists, and it was the precursor to the Boston Cooking School. “The school gave women of modest means an entry into professional work at a time when more women needed employment and few had career options.” This effort was funded by subscribers (similar to today’s public television model) and larger gifts from philanthropists. The first classes were given in March 1879 with seven pupils. The school quickly became popular, so it hired Mrs. David A. Lincoln to teach—her husband had recently suffered a financial setback so she headed off to work—and by 1882 she was handling over two thousand pupils. The school had expanded to teaching nurses the art of sickroom cookery, as well.
Mary Lincoln was to author the Boston Cooking School Cook Book in 1884 and the Boston School Kitchen Text-book in 1887; cofound the American Kitchen Magazine; lecture widely; write a newspaper column entitled “From Day to Day”; and author five additional cookbooks, the last in 1910. She was a vigorous endorser of products, including the White Mountain Ice Cream Freezer and Jell-O, and she was a principal in Mrs. Lincoln’s Baking Powder Company of Boston. She is also credited for laying the foundation for Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Bookin 1896.
The school quickly added accredited classes to train cooking school teachers under a Miss Maria Parloa, who was a well-known culinary figure of the period. She had authored The Appledore Cook Book (1872), Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book: A Guide to Marketing and Cooking (1880), and Practical Cookery (1884). She also wrote for the Ladies’ Home Journal, of which she was part owner. Parloa’s course included instruction in chemistry, given at the Women’s Laboratory. Students received instruction on anatomy from a Dr. Merritt. Chemistry? Anatomy? The Women’s Education Association and the Boston Cooking School were taking a very broad view of the culinary arts, and one that seems extremely modern. The President’s Report of 1884 included the following language in describing the goals of the school: “to lift this great social incubus of bad cooking and its incident evils from the households of the country at large.” This was a social, not just a culinary, movement.
By January 1884, the Boston Cooking School was now independent of the Women’s Education Association, and it soon became clear to those running it that the original goal—giving free lessons to the poor and training women to become professional cooks—was difficult to achieve, although they were determined to pursue their original charter. The money was to be found in giving lessons to the rich, not the poor. People wanted to be entertained; they wanted fancy cooking and did not want to be lectured about economy, health, hygiene, and science. Good cooking was easier to sell as a means of impressing one’s social peers than as a path to correcting the ills of society. Within a few years, a new teacher had shown up at the Boston Cooking School, a woman who understood the tastes and needs of Boston women. By the early twentieth century, this woman had gone out on her own, put the Boston Cooking School out of business with her own school, and published a cookbook that would sell a staggering four hundred thousand copies by the time of her death in 1914. The woman was Fannie Merritt Farmer.
Fannie was born in Boston in March 1857 and grew up in Medford, Massachusetts. She was one of five daughters: Sarah died in infancy, leaving Fannie and three younger sisters, Cora, Lillian, and Mary. (Fannie was also a distant cousin of Diana, Princess of Wales.) Summers were spent in Scituate, the home of her mother; in the evenings they played cribbage or skat; on Sundays they attended church, and sometimes pulled taffy. Her father, John Franklin Farmer, was a former newspaperman, a Unitarian, and a printer who stuck to the hand press while times were changing. As a result, his business prospects slowly deteriorated, as did the family’s modest income. According to his grandson, Dexter Perkins (the son of Cora, the only sister to have children), John Farmer was also a smooth talker who managed to get in to see plays without paying and sneak a second helping of Aunt Jemima pancakes that were being given for free to attendees at Boston’s annual food fair. Fannie’s mother, Mary Farmer, was of an independent nature, knitting quietly, for example, after her husband had declared that he was going down to the basement to kill himself. (After a decent interval, he returned and inquired as to her sang froid. She replied, “There wa’nt anything I could do about it.”) As the family fortunes waned, John came home one day with a new buggy inscribed with the letter F in gold. Mary commented, “F stands for Farmer, and F stands for fool.” When, in 1925, she was asked to opine on the wonderful qualities of her first grandchild, Mary replied tartly, “I’ve known his father longer.” Fannie had one other distinctive relative, her aunt Ella, who once took a football that bounced into her yard, cut it up, and threw the pieces back over the fence. She also cut Dexter Perkins out of her will, so Dexter’s less than fond memories of Great Aunt Ella may be suspect.
Fannie was stricken with polio while at Medford High School. This meant abandoning further education and also greatly reduced her chances for marriage. She was an invalid for the better part of ten years and always walked with a limp. The family moved back to Boston, first to Rutland Square and eventually to Back Bay, a more upscale neighborhood. Mary became a schoolteacher, and Cora married and bore a son, Dexter, for whom Fannie had a great fondness. (After Fannie’s death, Dexter’s wife would edit future editions of the cookbook.)
After a brief stint in retail Fannie worked as a mother’s helper in the Cambridge home of Mrs. Charles Shaw, where she managed to do a great deal of cooking. At the age of thirty-one, Fannie enrolled at the Boston Cooking School and graduated a year later, in 1889. She was offered the position of assistant to the principal, a woman named Carrie Dearborn, and became principal in 1893, when Dearborn left school to pursue the lecture circuit. Under her tutelage, the Boston Cooking School became considerably more popular and successful. (It has been noted, however, that the Boston Cooking School always had difficulty meeting its expenses because Fannie was so insistent on using the best possible ingredients.) In 1902 Fannie went out on her own, founding Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery at 40 Hereford Street. The Boston Cooking School closed its doors within a year and donated its equipment to Simmons College.
Was Fannie regarded as a good cook in her own time? According to one source, “She was too apt to let the pots burn as she ran enthusiastically from one recipe to another.” It was said that her sister Mary was a better cook, and that Maggie Murphy, the woman who ran the Farmer household starting in 1874, “outdid them all with delicate pastries and chowders.” (Murphy was also known to anonymously enter cooking contests judged by Fannie. Frequently, she won.) And looking at many of her recipes, one does find thick, floury sauces, an addiction to sugar, even in salad dressings and baked fish, and a mixed bag of recipes. Her niece, Wilma Lord Perkins, referred to her as “a great executive, food detective, and gourmet, rather than a great cook herself.” H. L. Mencken reviewed a 1930 edition of her cookbook; he commented that it represented “middle-class British notions of cookery” and deplored Fannie’s recipe for soft-shell crabs as “an obscenity almost beyond belief.” But let’s not blame Fannie for an edition of the cookbook published well after her time.
What she may have lacked as a talented cook she made up for with a keen sense of showmanship, marketing, and giving the public what it wanted. In fact, she often referred to herself first and foremost as a businesswoman. Here is a description of Fannie by Elizabeth Schlesinger, wife of Arthur Schlesinger: “Her bright blue eyes, red hair, and vivacious personality made people overlook her rather plain face and the pince-nez she always wore. She was plump and had no interest in dress, but a maid who accompanied her on lecture trips saw that she always looked well.” Zulma Steele, a biographer and magazine writer, described Fannie’s costume as follows, “Her piqué skirt hung full to the floor, protected by yards of gathered apron. Her gossamer shirtwaist had the daintiest of organdy fichus, and tiny hand-hemmed ruffles embellished her collars and cuffs.” Marjorie Mills, longtime food editor of the Boston Herald, described Miss Farmer as “limping briskly about her platform kitchen, teaching some 200 students. She was a prim girl with vibrant enthusiasm who arrived early at school laden with market supplies and was the last to leave at night.” Of course, she was always attended by an assistant and a maid or two, so much of the actual cooking was not done by Fannie. One later biographer commented, “Fannie Farmer refused to sully her own white fingertips in kneading up a flaky piecrust.” Likable, energetic, intelligent, and a wonderful show woman—this was the Fannie Farmer who energized the public and the fortunes of the Boston Cooking School.
Since I had started this process reading Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, and since Mary Lincoln seemed to be a thorough professional, the obvious question surfaced over and over again: Did Fannie simply steal Mary Lincoln’s work and make it her own through force of personality and strong marketing skills? Was Fannie more of a promoter and organizer than a creative culinary force? Did she simply take a body of work created by others at the Boston Cooking School and run off to the bank with it?
For starters, Fannie’s Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was without question a rewrite and update of Mary Lincoln’s original text from the 1880s. The key difference was who owned the copyright. Little, Brown, displaying a lack of confidence in the work, made Fannie responsible for the publication costs, acting only as distributor and agent. This meant that Fannie owned the copyright, and therefore the profits—not the first time a book publisher has misread the market. This also raised Fannie’s profile since she was the author, not the Boston Cooking School; in fact, the book was soon referred to as the “Fannie Farmer Cookbook.” The initial printing of 3,000 copies sold out quickly; it was reprinted twice in 1897, and once per year thereafter until 1906, when a revised edition came out, enjoying a first printing of 20,000 copies. From then on, the cookbook was reprinted annually and also translated into French and sold as Le Livre de Cuisine de l’Ecole de Cuisine de Boston. In 1915, at Fannie’s death, over 360,000 copies had been sold, and the average press run was up to 50,000 copies. It was by far the best-selling cookbook of its age. (By comparison, Ben Hur, perhaps the best-selling book of the late nineteenth century, had sold 400,000 copies in its first nine years of publication, falling just short of the Bible but outstripping Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Quo Vadis?, and Little Women.) Fannie published other books as well, including Chafing Dish Possibilities (1898), Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent (1904), What to Have for Dinner (1905), Catering for Special Occasions (1911), and A New Book of Cookery (1912). None of them came close to the success of the original volume.
Although we think of Fannie Farmer as having penned one of the few major cookbooks of her time, large cookbooks authored by well-known cooking school teachers and contemporary celebrities were nothing new. The first American cookbook of note was a reprint of The Compleat Housewife, which had been originally authored in England in 1727 by Eliza Smith and then reprinted for the American audience. Early recipes were vague hand-me-downs with sometimes silly directives such as this “receipt” for Indian pudding from the Plimouth Colony Cookbook: “Let the molasses drip in as you sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ but sing two verses in cold weather.” The most popular cookbook during the American Revolution was Hannah Glasse’s American Cookery Made Plain and Easy, but perhaps the most famous early American cookbook was Amelia Simmons’s work, American Cookery, which is readily available today in a facsimile edition and was the first cookbook to be protected by the Copyright Act of 1787. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the cookbook business started to heat up, with 160 titles published, including The New England Cookery, A New System of Domestic Cookery, The Universal Cook Book, The American Frugal Housewife, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book, and Modern American Cookery. These books were often more than cookbooks; they also had sections on medicine as well as household hints and management.
By the mid-1800s, cookbooks were also being published by social groups: for example, the Woman’s Suffrage Cook Book and The Temperance Cook Book. Churches also became involved, with Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, published by the Young Ladies Society of the First Baptist Church, and Tried and True Recipes 1897. The rise of cooking schools also resulted in more cookbooks, for instance, Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book and Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book. Other important cookbooks of the era included Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery, Marion Harland’s Complete Cookbook, Buckeye Cookery, The Carolina Housewife, The Kentucky Housewife, The Virginia Housewife, The White House Cookbook, The Complete Cook, Good-Living: A Practical Cookery-Book for Town and Country, Favorite Recipes, and, most notably, The Epicurean by Charles Ranhofer, which was by far the most thorough and professional cookbook of the nineteenth century.
Always with a keen ear for marketing and publicity, Fannie claimed that when she dined at a famous New York or Boston restaurant and the chef would not provide a recipe, she would secrete a dab of sauce or other victual in a handkerchief and “analyze it at the cooking school.” (This sounds like utter claptrap; it was clear from her attempts to reproduce dishes from, say, Delmonico’s, that the “dab of sauce” wasn’t doing her much good, since her versions fell a mile short of the original. Yet her students felt that they were getting the most cutting-edge food—the secrets of the great chefs of the day.)
MAY 2008. FOR OUR DINNER PARTY OF THE CENTURY, WE HAD to establish some rules about food preparation. My first thought was to ban the use of appliances, including mixers and food processors. A few months later, however, I was visiting friends in Andover, Maine, at the family “big house,” one of those massive eighteenth-century colonials, with winding passageways, cobbled-together additions, and a huge three-story-high main room. The kitchen was primitive at best, with a wood cookstove, complete with brass water heater. In a nod to the twentieth century, there was also a cheap electric range. There were no electric mixers, so I had to beat twelve egg whites by hand to produce the morning pancakes. That got me thinking—a twelve-course meal without plug-in appliances? This was looking grim.
We had decided to use refrigerators and freezers for food safety as much as anything else, plus hot water out of the tap for cleanup. The management of the cooking process, including how to hold foods until they were served, was going to be one of the biggest obstacles. I only had two ovens plus one cooktop on the coal cookstove. I hoped that modern ovens would not be necessary, but that would depend on the timing and order of the courses. Another large concern was the sheer quantity of food that had to be served perfectly hot, such as the rissoles (fried and filled puff pastry) and the fried baby artichokes. Was I going to have to give in to convenience and use the high-powered commercial wok hiding in my back kitchen, or would we be able to manage the heat of the stovetop and the space available to simultaneously fry enough food for a dinner party of twelve? (I finally decided to do almost all of the cooking on the wood cookstove, other than the baking of cakes; and that electric mixers and food processors would be used only for the baking.)
There were other considerations as well. For our jellies, commercial food colorings were out, so we had to reinvent the art of using natural ingredients to create a range of different-colored layers. And there were to be no shortcuts in making the puff pastry. For starters, we had to make the dough, fashion it into a 6-inch-square flour and butter mixture, and roll it out to 12 inches. This “paste,” as they called it in Fannie’s time, was then rolled into a 24- by 8-inch strip that was folded letterlike and refrigerated. This was repeated four or five times, and then refrigerated overnight before being rolled into a perfect strip one-sixteenth of an inch thick. No store-bought puff pastry here.
In addition, old recipes often call for odd measurements that had to be translated to modern terms. For example, a gill is five ounces, the same size as a teacup. A dessert spoon is half a tablespoon. We also came across a breakfast cup, which is half a pint.
The saddle of venison had to be larded on both sides using a larding needle, and we had to make a stock from an actual calf’s head for the soup. The lobster à l’Américaine required both homemade lobster and fish stocks; we would have to master regulating the cookstove in order to perfectly grill the salmon on the grilling insert; a hand-cranked ice-cream machine would be necessary to freeze the Canton punch; and the elaborate Mandarin cake required two separate cakes, a filling of Bavarian cream, a fondant icing, and tangerines filled with ice cream and two different jellies. And how much of this could be prepared ahead of time? We had to test the frozen punch (more or less a sorbet)—would it still be soft and refreshing if made the day ahead, or would it would turn dense and hard? And I knew from experience that jellies tend to stiffen over time: the gelatin keeps on working, so there might be a small window of time when our elaborate, towering jellies had the perfect texture. If they were too loose, we could not serve them properly; if too stiff, they would lose much of their flavor and be unappealing to eat. There were smaller, more finicky issues as well—for instance, how does one cut into a tower of jelly and serve it cleanly?
We also had to consider the issue of service. As in all Victorian households, our kitchen was downstairs and the dining room was upstairs. We had to serve twelve courses, many of them with more than one recipe on the plate, and keep the service well paced to get through the entire dinner in one evening. (One course every twenty minutes would mean a four-hour dinner; Victorian etiquette called for a two-hour time limit on formal dinners, a time frame that appeared impossible to meet.) Given a lack of space and our preference for performing carving and plating out of the view of our guests, we would have to figure out how to warm plates and move quickly to get the food to the table while it was still hot. We would also have to carefully orchestrate the silverware, the wineglasses, and the plates, since we would have to do a large amount of recycling during the dinner. Washing up had to be an ongoing activity, and well paced to provide the cutlery and flatware for upcoming courses.
We had eighteen months to test and refine the recipes, assemble a kitchen and waitstaff, pull together a dozen high Victorian table settings plus period table decorations, create a blue-ribbon guest list, figure out how to use an authentic Victorian cookstove, choose and taste-test the wines, and become experts on the cooking of Boston in the 1890s.
MY FIRST SERIOUS AND MOST EMBARRASSING ENCOUNTER WITH oysters occurred in the mid-1990s when Julia Child called to invite me over to cook dinner together. This was nothing special for Julia; she invited virtually everyone in the food world in Boston over to her home frequently since she loved company and she loved to cook. For me, it was nerve-wracking and, as it turned out, a near disaster.
I had met Julia a number of times at industry events and had driven to Boston back in the 1980s to interview her and her husband Paul for Cook’s Magazine. On that memorable occasion, we had an oyster stew and a warm crisp baguette that was yanked from the oven and ripped into hunks—delicious. And, like most of her viewers, I thought of Julia as a kindly teacher, a patient, accepting educator. What I did not realize until that evening was that Julia was playful and quite competitive, often putting others on the spot to see how well they would respond.
So a few minutes into our evening together, she sidled up to me with a large plastic tub and issued the challenge: “Would you mind shucking a few oysters?” using her inimitable and slightly challenging voice. Ten minutes later, by which time I had two oysters open and one slightly bloody finger, she came back and asked, with more than a hint of pixie humor in her query, “Do you need some help, dearie?” I thought for a moment and then threw caution to the wind. “Just get me the biggest glass of wine you can find, and then you shuck the oysters while I cook the rest of dinner!” We were good friends after that. I guess I failed the cooking test, but had passed the character part of the evening’s entertainment.
Despite this experience, the first course on our elaborate menu was to be, of course, oysters, the reason being that oysters were almost always the first thing served at any feast or serious dinner party. They were easy and abundant and Victorians loved them. Oysters were so popular that the beds at Wellfleet were fished out as early as 1775, so enterprising fishermen dumped oysters from Buzzard’s Bay into Wellfleet in the spring, thus ensuring fat, valuable “Wellfleet” oysters come fall. Eventually, hundreds of tons of oysters were dredged up from the Chesapeake and dumped onto New England beds so that they, too, could be given local names and higher prices. Oystermen also had a clever trick up their sleeve—“floating” oysters, which meant placing them on floats in low-salinity water. The oysters sucked in this fresher water, plumped up, and therefore weighed more, commanding higher prices. This process was banned in 1909, since the floats were often located near large population centers with polluted waters that offered the risk of contamination, resulting in outbreaks of typhoid.
In eighteenth-century Boston, oysters were sold door to door—the oystermen would open the oysters right there, throwing the shells into a large shoulder bag. Later, handcarts came into use, as they did with other food items. The first cooked oysters were sold by Peter B. Brigham at the head of Hanover Street, and he quickly amassed a fortune. Oyster houses soon sprang up—they were most popular between 1810 and 1875—and became a convenient, all-purpose meeting place since there were no lunch counters in Boston or other fast-food establishments. Oysters were cheap, required little to no preparation, and the oyster houses stayed open late at night. All told, there were about a thousand establishments in Boston that served oysters by the mid-nineteenth century.
Early oyster boats were as small as sixteen feet long, no more than dugouts made from white pine. In 1874, the oyster business came into the steam age when a small steam engine was installed in the sloop Early Bird owned by Peter Decker of Norwalk, Connecticut. By the early 1900s, the steam-powered oyster boat had started to decline in favor of gasoline engines, which took up less room and so could be used on smaller boats. Dredging an oyster bed in a sailboat required fairly advanced skills. The key was to drift over the bed, starting upwind with the centerboard down, and then to let the wind and tide take you over the prime real estate. The jib was trimmed to just short of luffing, and the main had to be trimmed just enough to keep the bow headed into the wind. Small hand dredges were used by oystermen standing on the side of the boat. The smaller sailboats were often outfitted with a hand-winder dredge (these were eventually run by steam power when steam engines came into use), but that meant one dredge per boat, a less efficient method than having four or five workmen, standing at the gunwales, using hand dredges. Once the industry moved away from sail power, larger boats used bigger hydraulic dredges.
In Fannie’s time, virtually every menu started with a large platter of oysters served on a bed of crushed ice or a large block of ice that had a hollowed-out center trough. Special oyster plates that held four to six oysters and platters that usually held a dozen were also used, with a bed of ice covered with a doily, the rims decorated with holly or fern. Oysters were also fricasséed (served in a slightly thickened cream sauce), creamed, battered and fried as fritters (eggs, milk, and flour were used for the batter), or put into a stew (made from water, oyster liquor, and cream) or stuffing. Fannie also suggested serving oysters with brown bread, so we tested her recipe and made a few minor alterations. It was served in small rounds spread with salted butter.
So our first course, oysters, was simple enough. Our second course, mock turtle soup, would test the limits of our culinary adventurism.
CHAMPAGNE MIGNONETTE
1 cup champagne vinegar
2 tablespoons minced shallot
½ teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
Combine ingredients and serve with oysters.
BROWN BREAD
Since we served this bread with oysters, it is less sweet than many other recipes and, of course, contains no raisins, a common ingredient at the time. You will need two 12-ounce coffee cans for baking.
4 tablespoons melted butter, plus extra for preparing cans
1 cup rye flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup fine ground white cornmeal
2¼ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup light molasses
2¼ cups buttermilk
2 12-ounce coffee cans, washed and dried
1. Grease the bottoms of the coffee cans with butter. Line the sides of the coffee cans with parchment paper (cut to fit), and grease with butter. Place a steamer rack on the bottom of a large pot that is tall enough to accommodate the can with the cover on. In a large saucepan, boil enough water to fill the steaming pot about halfway.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the molasses, buttermilk, and butter, and mix until combined. Spoon batter into prepared cans; do not fill cans more than two-thirds full. Cover tightly with aluminum foil. Secure foil to cans with a rubber band or twine. Place can on rack (or on bottom of pot), and pour boiling water to about halfway up the coffee cans. Return water to a boil and lower to a simmer. Cover the pot. Steam for 2 hours, adding more boiling water as needed, until bread is firm and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
3. Place cans on a cooling rack, allow to cool 10 minutes, then unmold. Allow to cool for 1 hour before slicing.