Was Fannie Farmer a Good Cook?

John Hartwell

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"Fannie was attending Medford (Mass.) High School when she contracted polio and was confined to her bed for years. While she slowly recovered, she took up cooking and turned her family’s home into a boardinghouse.​
At 31, she entered the Boston Cooking School. After she graduated a year later she was asked to stay on as assistant principal. Five years later she was running the school and publishing the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook
By her own admission, she was more of a promoter and a businesswoman than a great cook."​
An excellent account of the life of a remarkable woman from the New England Historical Society:
 
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I'd always kind of assumed she was like many a famous How-To author, and likely better at writing and such like than at whatever she was writing about. Although hopefully she wan't as bad as Thomas Tusser, the guy who wrote Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry -- best selling book at the time, and some of his proverbial sayings live on to day, but he died in a pauper's prison. Fuller, in his Worthies of England, said of Tusser:"None being better at the theory or worse at the practice of husbandry."

I had not realized the cookbook had such a rocky history after Fanny Farmer died! Although that does explain why it wasn't so popular in my childhood.
 
"Fannie was attending Medford (Mass.) High School when she contracted polio and was confined to her bed for years. While she slowly recovered, she took up cooking and turned her family’s home into a boardinghouse.​
At 31, she entered the Boston Cooking School. After she graduated a year later she was asked to stay on as assistant principal. Five years later she was running the school and publishing the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook
By her own admission, she was more of a promoter and a businesswoman than a great cook."​
An excellent account of the life of a remarkable woman from the New England Historical Society:
We have posted alot of recipes from the Boston Cooking School Cookbook.i think i have an online link for the book.if i do i will post the link.
 
The Boston Cooking School was begun in 1879 by the Woman's Educational Association of Boston, its purpose: "to offer instruction in cooking to those who wished to earn their livelihood as cooks, or who would make practical use of such information in their families." For poorer students, the school offered a series of six classes in basic cooking for $1.50. For the benefit of the wealthy (and their cooks), the school offered weekly lecture/demonstrations in advanced cooking techniques. Mary Johnson Lincoln was the first principal. "In 1880, the School joined forces with the Industrial Aid Society to offer free cooking classes in Boston's primarily-immigrant North End. Special courses on nutrition were organized for students at the Harvard Medical School; classes on 'sick-room cookery' were offered to nurses from several hospitals in Boston, as well as Concord, NH." [Wikipedia]

The school's first cookbook, Mrs Lincoln's Boston Cook Book: what to do and what not to do in cooking (1884), was primarily intended as a text book for the school, but was also sold to the public, and remained in print long after Fannie Farmer's more famous 1896 book was published.

In 1902, the Boston Cooking School became part of Simmons College. Fannie Farmer left, and opened "Miss Farmer's School of Cookery," which continued after her death in 1915, and lasted into the 1940s.
 
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