Considered the “greatest American cookbook,” Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published over a century ago, was acclaimed for a number of innovations. It was the first to use terms now considered standard in American cooking (e.g., a level cupful, teaspoonful, and tablespoonful); it relied on simple directions and showed a hitherto neglected concern for nutrition. Novices as well as practiced cooks of the period were treated to a vast amount of information that left nothing to the user’s imagination — from instructions for building a fire to how to bone a bird. Today’s cooks will find step-by-step instructions for preparing an enormous array of dishes, including such early American fare as fried corn meal mush, baked cod with oyster stuffing, and tipsy pudding; adaptations of continental cuisine — quenelles and loin of veal à la jardinère — as well as hundreds of recipes for beverages, breads, pastries, meat, vegetable and poultry dishes, soups, salads, hot and cold desserts, and much more. A fascinating record of how people cooked in the late nineteenth century, this authentic facsimile of the first Fannie Farmer cookbook will delight lovers of nostalgia. For homemakers, it remains “the ultimate American cookbook classic … as useful today as it was 100 years ago.” Fannie Farmer, she of the famous cooking school, has left us this 1896 cookbook whose influence lives on today. In many ways the first nationally distributed cookbook, its pages contain illustrations and, in the back, advertisements for products, some of which still exist (such as King Arthur Flour, Knox's Gelatine, and Swansdown Flour), others of which are long gone (Cottolene shortening; Witchkloth, the "magic polisher"). The recipes tend to hang in the balance between quaint and more modern. The Creole Sauce has changed very little over the past 125 years, yet the "Macédoine" consists entirely of vegetables, not fruits! Of the eggless "potato mayonnaise" recipe on p. 291, it is said: "By the taste one would hardly realize eggs were not used in the making." Miss Farmer's recipes are also noteworthy for their insistence on precise measurements, a novelty at the time. This particular bit of rock-ribbed Americana is in hardcover. Should one buy it? It's so useful still -- why not?