Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The (Penguin 60s)
This Book is Currently in the Wild!
2 journalers for this copy...
This is not an ordinary book: it's a BookCrossing book! BookCrossing books are world travelers - they like to have adventures and make new friends...and with your help, they can even write home to say what they've been doing! (You may remain anonymous if you wish.)Selections from the famous Fannie Farmer cookbook.
I don't cook much...but this is a fascinating document, and I love the Penguin 60s format.
The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac
Bartleby by Herman Melville
Baseball: Our Game by John Thorn
Blue Rose by Peter Straub
The Chrysanthemums by John Steinbeck
Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Dead by James Joyce
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen
A Gathering of Ghost Stories by Robertson Davies
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
The Man with the Twisted Lip by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy
The Overcoat and The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Sixty Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Three Tales of Horror by Poe, Bierce, & Stevenson
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
To Build a Fire by Jack London
The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Youth by Joseph Conrad
Bartleby by Herman Melville
Baseball: Our Game by John Thorn
Blue Rose by Peter Straub
The Chrysanthemums by John Steinbeck
Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Dead by James Joyce
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen
A Gathering of Ghost Stories by Robertson Davies
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
The Man with the Twisted Lip by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy
The Overcoat and The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Sixty Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Three Tales of Horror by Poe, Bierce, & Stevenson
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
To Build a Fire by Jack London
The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Youth by Joseph Conrad
Reserved for a wishlist tag.
Tuesday, June 09, 2020: off to New Hampshire!
USPS tracking 9549 0104 3301 0161 7682 13
ETA 6/30
Released for Secretariat's 2020 NJABBIC challenge (week 23: place names).
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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This is now your book, for you to do with as you please: keep it as long as you wish, pass it to a friend, or maybe even leave it where someone else can find it!
If you've ever wondered where your books go after they leave your hands, join BookCrossing and you may find out: you'll be able to follow your books as new readers make journal entries - sometimes from surprisingly far-flung locations.
BookCrossing: making the whole world a library!
USPS tracking 9549 0104 3301 0161 7682 13
ETA 6/30
Released for Secretariat's 2020 NJABBIC challenge (week 23: place names).
I'm so glad you've found this book! Won't you make a journal entry so the previous readers know that it's safe with you?
How and where did you find the book? What did you think of it? What are you going to do with it next?
This is now your book, for you to do with as you please: keep it as long as you wish, pass it to a friend, or maybe even leave it where someone else can find it!
If you've ever wondered where your books go after they leave your hands, join BookCrossing and you may find out: you'll be able to follow your books as new readers make journal entries - sometimes from surprisingly far-flung locations.
BookCrossing: making the whole world a library!
The books (and bookmarks) arrived safely today; many thanks! This is one of the Penguin 60s that I haven't seen before - and a perfect choice for a release somewhere in Boston, once I'm more comfortable traveling there. [Update: I found a copy of Fannie's Last Supper, a book about the re-creation of a meal from the cook book! Amusingly, the author of that one found many of Farmer's recipes disappointing for one reason or another, and wound up tweaking some of them for the purpose of the dinner.]
I enjoyed some of the details here, including a weights-and-measures table up front that shows a number of ingredients with the measurement in cups that equates to one pound - 2 cups of butter, 4 3/4 cups of rolled oats, 9 large eggs... I've seldom seen a recipe that needed "a pound of eggs", but if I do now I know what the conversion is! (Probably handier for those without access to a food scale.)
The timetables are... interesting. Some items sound about right - 3 minutes for a soft-cooked egg, for example - but it has some seriously-overcooked times for things like fresh vegetables, with peas and green beans supposedly to be cooked for up to an HOUR.
The recipes themselves tend towards the simple and practical, with relatively few ingredients and simplified cooking methods. Some of them did test my vocabulary - "what are 'zephyrettes' when they're at home?" (Turns out they're a type of cracker.) And a few of the recipes were so unexpected and droll that they got my attention - after two different versions of Welsh Rarebit came another bread/cheese/cayenne variant called "English Monkey", which would be fun to add to a party menu if only to mess with people!
The section on "Helpful Hints to the Young Housekeeper" had lots of basic techniques - how to scald milk, chop parsley, wash carafes (hint: fill them with soapy water with torn-up newspaper added, and shake well), and clean a copper boiler ("use Putz Pomade Cream" - I swear I'm not making that up; whatever happened to the Putz Pomade Cream company? [Pause for Google - whoa, it's still available!]).
And then we come to the menus, or as they're listed here, "suitable combinations for serving". The full-course dinner runs to twelve courses, from oysters to coffee, and is the template used in the "last supper" book - though with some departures from the suggested menus here.
My favorite part of the book is at the end, the listings for the courses of instruction at the school. "One lesson a week from 9 to 12:30", with no more than eight pupils per class; twelve lessons in "Plain Cooking" cost $12, with an extra $3 for materials. The first lesson starts with the making and care of a fire - so important! And I'm so glad I don't have to do that every day! Or at all! - and proceeds to coffee, bread, tomato soup, croutons, boiled potatoes, mutton chops, and German toast - quite a lot for three and a half hours. [The "Richer Cooking" course costs $15 and sounds a bit ritzier, with "frizzled beef" instead of mutton chops and Lyonnaise potatoes instead of boiled.] There are also special lessons in laundry work or sick-room cookery, so all in all it sounds pretty handy for those who want to learn the trade or who are just starting out in running their own households and need some help in those pre-Internet days.
I enjoyed some of the details here, including a weights-and-measures table up front that shows a number of ingredients with the measurement in cups that equates to one pound - 2 cups of butter, 4 3/4 cups of rolled oats, 9 large eggs... I've seldom seen a recipe that needed "a pound of eggs", but if I do now I know what the conversion is! (Probably handier for those without access to a food scale.)
The timetables are... interesting. Some items sound about right - 3 minutes for a soft-cooked egg, for example - but it has some seriously-overcooked times for things like fresh vegetables, with peas and green beans supposedly to be cooked for up to an HOUR.
The recipes themselves tend towards the simple and practical, with relatively few ingredients and simplified cooking methods. Some of them did test my vocabulary - "what are 'zephyrettes' when they're at home?" (Turns out they're a type of cracker.) And a few of the recipes were so unexpected and droll that they got my attention - after two different versions of Welsh Rarebit came another bread/cheese/cayenne variant called "English Monkey", which would be fun to add to a party menu if only to mess with people!
The section on "Helpful Hints to the Young Housekeeper" had lots of basic techniques - how to scald milk, chop parsley, wash carafes (hint: fill them with soapy water with torn-up newspaper added, and shake well), and clean a copper boiler ("use Putz Pomade Cream" - I swear I'm not making that up; whatever happened to the Putz Pomade Cream company? [Pause for Google - whoa, it's still available!]).
And then we come to the menus, or as they're listed here, "suitable combinations for serving". The full-course dinner runs to twelve courses, from oysters to coffee, and is the template used in the "last supper" book - though with some departures from the suggested menus here.
My favorite part of the book is at the end, the listings for the courses of instruction at the school. "One lesson a week from 9 to 12:30", with no more than eight pupils per class; twelve lessons in "Plain Cooking" cost $12, with an extra $3 for materials. The first lesson starts with the making and care of a fire - so important! And I'm so glad I don't have to do that every day! Or at all! - and proceeds to coffee, bread, tomato soup, croutons, boiled potatoes, mutton chops, and German toast - quite a lot for three and a half hours. [The "Richer Cooking" course costs $15 and sounds a bit ritzier, with "frizzled beef" instead of mutton chops and Lyonnaise potatoes instead of boiled.] There are also special lessons in laundry work or sick-room cookery, so all in all it sounds pretty handy for those who want to learn the trade or who are just starting out in running their own households and need some help in those pre-Internet days.
Journal Entry 5 by 
GoryDetails
at Little Free Library - Myrtle Street Playground - 45 Myrtle St. in Boston, Massachusetts USA on Monday, March 15, 2021
GoryDetails at Little Free Library - Myrtle Street Playground - 45 Myrtle St. in Boston, Massachusetts USA on Monday, March 15, 2021
Released 3 yrs ago (3/15/2021 UTC) at Little Free Library - Myrtle Street Playground - 45 Myrtle St. in Boston, Massachusetts USA
WILD RELEASE NOTES:
Guidelines for safely visiting and stocking Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the LFL site here.I left this book and several others in this book-roofed Little Free Library on this very cold and windy day. Hope someone enjoys the books!
[See other recent releases in MA here.]
*** Released for the 2021 Wine+Food challenge. ***
*** Released for the 2021 Oh the Places We Can Go challenge. ***
*** Released for the 2021 Keep Them Moving challenge. ***
