Fannie's Last Supper (3 page)

So we decided to stick with the earlier, British recipe for punch, a simple alcoholic drink made from rum, water, fruit juice of some sort, sugar, and a spice or two. We made a few minor revisions and added five drops of bitters just to add a hint of bite to the foundation of the drink. It was now perfect. In fact, it is so good that we have been drinking it ever since.

VICTORIA PUNCH

This recipe, with a few minor changes, is courtesy of Donald Friary and, I am told, improves with age. I suggest that you make it a day or two ahead of time. Serve chilled, although it does not need to be refrigerated for storage.

4 tablespoons sugar

8 tablespoons lime juice

1 cup rum

1 cup water

Pinch nutmeg

5 drops bitters

Combine ingredients and pour over ice to serve.

Chapter 3
Oysters

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

W
ho 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 Book
in 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.