The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book

The book that taught America to measure. Fannie Farmer's 1896 classic replaced the pinch, the lump and the teacup of the old receipts with the level cup and the level spoon — and then filled eight hundred pages with what to do next.

About the Book

1896Published
Fannie Merritt FarmerAuthor
1823Recipes

Fannie Merritt Farmer became principal of the Boston Cooking-School in 1891, and in 1896 published the book that made her name a household word. Its innovation was exactness: level measurements, stated oven conditions, and a method a beginner could actually follow.

It is far more than recipes. The book opens with chapters on food chemistry, on the composition of what we eat, on bread-making and the care of the kitchen fire, and it closes with menus, invalid cookery and helpful hints for the young housekeeper.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR of the 1896 edition, reconciled page by page, one recipe to a page.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1896 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.