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.

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Flour (Cups Brown Stock Juice lemon)

1⅓ cups Brown Stock Juice 1 lemon 2 sprigs parsley Pound veal until one-fourth inch thick and cut in pieces for serving. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, put in bakingpan, pour over wine, and let stand thirty minutes. Drain, dip in flour, arrange in two buttered pans, and pour over remaining ingredients and wine which was drained from meat. Cover, and cook slowly until meat is tender. Remove to serving dish and pour over sauce remaining in pan. Loin of Veal à la Jardinière Wipe four pounds loin of veal, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Put one-fourth cup butter in deep stewpan; when melted, add veal and brown entire surface of meat, watching carefully and turning often, that it may not burn. Add one cup hot water, cover closely, and cook slowly two hours, or until meat is tender, adding more water as needed, using in all about three cups. Remove meat, thicken stock remaining in pan with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Surround the meat with two cups each boiled turnips and carrots, cut in half-inch cubes, and potatoes cut in balls. Serve gravy in a tureen.

For the Modern Kitchen

The page has been garbled in transcription: the first recipe's ingredient list survives only as a fragment ("1½ cups Brown Stock, juice 1 lemon, 2 sprigs parsley"), with the veal quantity, the wine and the butter missing from the list although the method calls for them. The second recipe, Loin of Veal à la Jardinière, is complete and can be followed as written.

A Little History

Veal occupies a long stretch of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and it is often suggested that in 1896 it was cheap urban meat, the surplus bull calves of dairy herds around Boston reaching the butcher in cuts that rewarded slow moist cooking rather than roasting — though this is inference rather than documented fact. "À la jardinière" is straightforward French kitchen shorthand — from jardin, garden — for a dish ringed with separately cooked vegetables cut to matching shapes, and its appearance in an American teaching cookbook shows how thoroughly Farmer expected her students to absorb the vocabulary of the professional French kitchen even while cooking on a coal range. The turnip-carrot-potato trio is the plainest possible reading of the garnish; grander tables added peas, beans and turned vegetables in separate mounds rather than a mixed border.

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