Read Fannie's Last Supper for Free Online

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