19th Century Food and Recipes

I recently came across an old cookbook, The Original Fanny Farmer 1896 Cookbook.  The book’s subtitle includes “A facsimile of the first edition,” and I found copies of that edition named “The Boston Cooking School Cookbook.”  Miss Farmer’s book was printed in 21 editions during her lifetime, and has survived a century after her death. 

I often write about food on The Stories, partly because it’s a topic of too much interest for me, and largely because food is such a huge part of our culture.  When I see a book like this I’m reading to learn how to cook something new and to see how and what people were eating in the nineteenth century.  And when I see something coming out of New England, I can’t help but contrast the differences in that culture and Appalachian culture.

I suppose I approached this cookbook of Boston origin with a bit of skepticism – surely a sophisticated cooking school in Massachusetts would not be teaching cooks like my Great-Great-Grandmas, would they?  Well, it turns out that Miss Farmer was really dedicated to teaching home-makers rather than solely training pretentious chefs.  While The Boston Cooking School may have been dedicated to professionals, she would later leave there to start her own school and to truly focus on teaching wives and mothers to nourish their own families.  Understanding her passion, you immediately see that her recipes are easy to read and follow and mostly made of common ingredients.  These are dishes any of us might put on our supper table.

The thing that most strikes me as missing in the book is pork.  Beef is discussed over 20 pages, then veal over another 4; even sweetbreads have 2 pages of their own.  Poultry and game are allowed 20 pages and fish 13.  However, pork is allocated only 3 pages, without a single detailed recipe.  Only basic instructions in how to cook various cuts of pork are given. 

The absence of pork stands out to me because it has always been such a staple of mountain diets.  I wonder why Bostonians were not cooking as much of it.  Research I did for Margaret’s Faith taught me that mid and late 19th century, Chicago was a shipping center for pork and those slaughter houses remained as an integral part of the mid-West city into the 1970’s.  Cincinnati, Ohio was also a mecca for pork finishing in the late 1800’s.  Do you suppose that New England was so far removed from those regions that pork would garner so little space in this cookbook?

All this searching for our common foods made me wonder about dumplings.  While I know of only one way to make dumplings, we can sure plop them into a variety of dishes.  Chicken and Dumplings is synonymous with the Southern table and it isn’t even mentioned here.  She does note that dumplings can be cooked on top of stew and a recipe for Beef Stew with Dumplings is given.  What do you reckon Miss Farmer would’ve said about Blackberry Dumplings?

Oh, we’re going to have to visit this topic again – there’s a whole chapter dedicated to “Recipes Especially Prepared for the Sick”, and very good information about flours and milling and baking bread!