Fannie Farmer, Fanny Farmer
Cookbooks and candy, how could you go wrong?
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Mission statement
Take time, feel gratitude, forgive. Remember what matters: Spirit, authenticity, justice, words. Let the work come. Don’t force it. Wait, and inspiration will come sooner than you think. Let your little story come out and play.
The pink ribbon of death
Some of the utility poles in my neighborhood are sporting jaunty pink ribbons. A line worker from PGE told me that those are the utility poles that will be replaced. This post is on our parking strip. It’s about 100 years old and has been ravaged by weather and insects, mostly insects.
Abandoned
Why do you suppose this scratching post has been put by the curb for anyone who wants it to take it away? Maybe the owner bought a new post in better repair, but my guess is that the cat is gone. It died or has run away or been given to someone’s niece. This scratching post isn’t needed anymore. It stands stark and lonely amid the fallen leaves, suffering the indignities of rain and wind and indifference.
Fannie Farmer
When I was a teen, I made hundreds of batches of sugar cookies from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. My mother told me that Fannie Farmer was famous for introducing precise measurements into cooking. Men scoffed at the idea, she said, complaining that women didn’t have a head for such things as cups and tablespoons.
Farmer didn’t dream up the idea of careful measurement; that was the Boston school. But she was a star pupil there and eventually became the principal. And she was the force behind the cookbook.
A quote attributed to her:
Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results. Good judgment, with experience, has taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides.
And a poem I wrote about measuring:
Measurements
Be careful and measure. Level the tablespoon. Cream everything thoroughly Or your cake won’t turn out. What if life took leveling, Measuring daily, As if being careful would Keep you from stumbling? But who’d want to live that way, Worrying about levels? I’ll take my measurements Freeform and messy.
Venerable book
The Boston Cooking School Cook Book was originally copyrighted in 1896. My mom’s seventh edition, revised in 1941 and printed in 1945, lists 2,421,000 copies by that date.
It’s inscribed “Mrs. George W. Kreuder from Aunt Dolly.” In those days, most married women went by their husband’s names.
This 1945 edition includes a list of Fifty Basic Recipes. How many do you recognize? How many of them have you made?
1. White bread 2. Standard rolls 3. Baking powder biscuits 4. Muffins 5. Griddle cakes 6. Waffles 7. Doughnuts 8. Canapés 9. Brown stock 10. Plain stuffing 11. White sauce 12. Hollandaise 13. Broiled steak 14. Roast beef 15. Broiled chicken 16. Fried chicken 17. Roast chicken 18. Chicken stew 19. Chicken timbales 20. Potato croquettes 21. French dressing 22. Mayonnaise 23. Mixed green salad 24. Molded salads 25. Soft custard 26. Steamed puddings 27. French soufflé 28. Cottage pudding 29. Shortcake 30. Fruit fritters 31. Cream puffs 32. Ice cream 33. Hard sauce 34. Puff paste 35. Plain pastry 36. Lemon chiffon pie 37. Sponge cake 38. Two-egg cake 39. Chocolate cake 40. Boiled frosting 41. Butter frosting 42. Cream filling 43. Sugar cookies 44. Meringues 45. Petits fours 46. Party sandwiches 47. Chocolate fudge 48. Jelly 49. Jam 50. Canned fruit
Over the years, using other cookbooks, I’ve made all but seven of them: chicken timbales, potato coquettes, French soufflé (for dessert; I’ve made cheese soufflé as an entrée), fruit fritters, lemon chiffon pie (but lemon meringue), cream filling and petits fours.
Wondering what hard sauce is? It’s sugar creamed with butter and flavored with liquor such as rum or brandy. It’s hard because you refrigerate it. Serve it with fruitcake, gingerbread or plum pudding.
Cookies
I only made a few things from the 1945 Fannie Farmer book when I was growing up. Mostly I baked sugar cookies. My two brothers and sister gobbled them up, so I made them nearly every day. I remember puzzling over the 16 variations, unable to choose. I usually stuck with chocolate—adding two squares of melted unsweetened chocolate. There were instructions for adding extra flour and rolling them out, but that was too much trouble. I always just dropped them.
Sugar Cookies from Fannie Farmer
Makes 50-60 small cookies
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg or 2 egg yolks 1 tablespoon cream or milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups flour
Let butter stand at room temperature until soft. Beat in sugar, egg, milk and vanilla. Sift flour and salt and add. Mix well.
Drop from tip of spoon 1 inch apart on cookie sheet. For flat cookies, press with knife or fork dipped in water or flatten with the bottom of a water glass. For rolled cookies, add about 1/4 cup more flour, enough to make mixture stiff. Chill thoroughly (1 hour or more). Roll part at a time 1/4 inch thick. Cut out cookies and arrange on cookie sheet.
To decorate, sprinkle with plain or colored sugar or arrange nuts, raisins, coconut, citron, angelica, dates, fig, candied fruits or fruit peel, etc.
Bake at 375 degrees about 8 minutes. Remove from sheet and cool on wire rack. Plain cookies may be brushed with melted butter while still warm or spread with melted semisweet chocolate or frosting.
Store tightly covered, with waxed paper between layers.
For richer cookies increase butter to 1 cup and add 1 egg yolk. Use the extra white to brush the cookies after they are cut out.
Variations
Almond cookies: Add 1/3 cup almonds, blanched and finely chopped; 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg; and grated rind of 1/2 lemon.
Butterscotch cookies: Use brown sugar, heated with butter until well-blended. Add 1/4 cup chopped nut meats (try black walnuts), if desired.
Chocolate cookies: Add 1/3 cup dry cocoa or 2 squares melted chocolate before adding flour. Bake at 325. Frost with chocolate frosting if desired.
Coconut cookies: Add 1/2 cup shredded coconut, chopped fine. Drop cookies.
Date cookies: Add 1/2 cup dates, cut fine with wet scissors. Drop cookies.
Ginger sugar cookies: Add 1 teaspoon ground ginger or 1/4 cup candied ginger, cut fine.
Lemon sugar cookies: Omit vanilla. Add 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract and 2 teaspoons grated lemon rind.
Maple cookies: Use maple sugar, crushed fine, in place of white.
Marmalade cookies: Reduce sugar to 2/3 cup. Add 6 teaspoons marmalade.
Christmas cookies: Increase butter to 1 cup. Use 2 eggs. Add 1/2 cup sour cream and 1 teaspoon soda. Add enough flour to make stiff enough to roll. Chill. Cut 1/4 inch thick. Frost with confectioners frosting and sprinkle with colored sugar.
Nut cookies: Add 1/2 cup chopped nut meats.
Orange cookies: Use orange juice instead of milk. Add grated rind of 1/2 orange. Two egg yolks instead of the egg adds color. Or use four egg yolks, varying the liquid accordingly.
Raisin cookies: Add 1/2 cup chopped seeded raisins. Drop cookies.
Seedcakes: Add 1-1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds.
Spiced sugar cookies: Add 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg or cinnamon -- or both.
Sand tarts: Chill, roll out 1/4 inch thick and cut with doughnut cutter. Brush with egg white; sprinkle with sugar-cinnamon. Arrange 3 blanched almond halves on each. Or, roll in rectangle 1/2 inch thick, brush with egg white, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, decorate with almonds and cut into squares.
—From The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer
Back of the book
I also have a more ancient version of the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, from 1919. This volume is notable for 30 pages of advertisements in the back of the book. One is for Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery at 30 Huntington Avenue in Boston. That address is now an apartment house in Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Jamaica Plain is also the location of the motherhouse of a Catholic order called the Daughters of St. Paul. The nuns who live there work in communications: books, videos and radio programs.
For many years, I worked for their book publisher, Pauline Books & Media, as a freelance copyeditor. Once, during a visit to my daughter in Cambridge, I was given a tour of the facility. I saw nuns drive the forklift in the book warehouse and don headsets in the recording studios.
Back to the cookbook
Many of the advertisers in the back of the 1919 Fannie Farmer book are still with us: Fleischmann’s yeast, Del Monte canned tomatoes, Borden’s Eagle Brand Condensed Milk, Ivory soap, Knox gelatin, Dromedary dates, Bell’s Seasoning and King Arthur Flour. The packaging for Bell’s and King Arthur has not changed since 1919!
The ad for Welch’s Grapelade includes recipes for muffins, conserve and a version of Charlotte russe (a bygone dessert with mousse and ladyfingers). Airline Honey’s ad also offers a Charlotte russe recipe, made with honey.
You can’t buy a Dover Sanitary Sink Pail with Straining Cover today. The 5-1/2 quart version of the galvanized steel pail you could use to stain vegetable parings or coffee grounds cost 75 cents in 1919, shipping included.
“Putzen” is German for “to shine” or “to polish.”
Fanny Farmer Candies
The chain of candy stores bears a similar name to the cookbook author (“Fanny” instead of “Fannie”), but there’s no other relationship.
The candy maker started out with a single store in Rochester, N.Y., in 1919. It operated as many as 400 shops across the country before fizzling out in the early 21st century.
I remember the Fanny Farmer store at Southdale, a huge shopping center in Edina. It had the same neat appearance as See’s Candy shops.
Southdale
Southdale, which opened in 1956, was a magical place for my family when we lived in nearby Bloomington from 1959-1964. It was the first fully enclosed climate-controlled mall in the US—an important consideration in frigid-winter Minnesota.
It was created and anchored by Dayton’s, a Minneapolis department store chain that later created and then was subsumed by Target. I remember Dayton’s as a midlevel store on a level with Macy’s or, in Portland, Meier & Frank or Frederick & Nelson. Nordstrom, a Seattle chain that came along later, is tonier.
Edina
Despite being in the shadow of the famous Mall of Americas, which opened in Bloomington in 1992, Southdale has survived in Edina. It’s now being renovated into a destination that includes apartments and amenities like a grocery store on-site. Its retail anchor is Macy’s, which eventually took over Dayton-Hudson after that company had gobbled up Meier & Frank.
In the 1960s, when the mall was still new, I remember ascending the long two-story escalator, entranced by strings of tiny mirrors suspended from the ceiling.
My sixth-grade class visited the Fanny Farmer factory in Minneapolis in 1961. I still remember watching thick ropes of red and white fondant twisted together in an ever-thinning stream to create candy canes. Of course, the best part of the outing was the samples.
Too much candy
Overindulgence in candy over a lifetime landed me in pre-diabetic territory by my 60s. I already have a major health setback in the MS, and I don’t need to add diabetes. So, carbs are off-limits now. I find if I don’t eat sweets at all, I don’t crave them. There are plenty of wonderful flavors to enjoy that aren’t based on sweetness.
Instead of indulging, I wrote a verse.
Carb criminals
Stop eating cookies! Leave out pastry, too. Hot dog buns and waffles And Cheetos are forbidden. Sugar’s the enemy, Pure, white and deadly. Replace it with strange alcohols Or bitter-tasting stevia. Remember, your body will thank you— Look at that low glucose reading! Forgo the ice cream and candy, But always have cake on your birthday.
Checkout
A writing quotation
In Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, the character Everett Wharton describes his friend Ferdinand Lopez:
He had read much, and, though he generally forgot what he read, there were left to him from his readings certain nebulous lights begotten by other men’s thinking which enabled him to talk on most subjects.
I’m a lot like Ferdinand. A career in newspaper editing, where I got to read all day every day, brought me in contact with plenty that I’ve forgotten. But those nebulous lights, buried in secret creases of my brain, still allow me to think I know almost everything.
Another quotation
Writing is a means of appreciating the world, allowing us to pay attention and concentrate so that we notice and record the unique, sometimes fleeting truths that the divine sends to each of us, our stories.
—Sherri Mandell, The Kabbalah of Writing
I like the way Mandell uses the word “notice.” Paying attention, to what happens outside us and, at the same time, within us, is a prerequisite to successful writing. To write well, you must open your heart in a way that combines that inner knowing with what is physically present.
Raindrops
The dialog of inner and outer applies to all creative expression.
When I took this photograph, I was trying to capture the spray of droplets as water dripped onto the bottom stair from the roofline above. All those little white dots are the result. They are water spray.
But, when viewed through the lens of my being, my inner and outer awareness, those dots become more than just drops of water. They are a mystical gift from the Universe.
—30—
Until next week
Thank you for reading Becoming. I appreciate “likes” and I love reading and interacting with comts. I’d still like to hear about your favorite cookbook.
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So many recipes for sugar cookies and their embellishments; only to twist our heads with the admonition not to eat cookies! I'll take my chances. So far, so good, and I've been extremely lucky.
What a delicious collection of prose and poems.