For my friends who like history and cooking, I have two books by Mary J. Lincoln. They are not to be confused with the more famous Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer. (I'll write about that in a future post).
Up until the late 1800s, generally you learned how to cook from your mother. For female children, it was simply a part of growing up that your chores reflected the domestic tasks that you would need to know how to do so one day you could take care of your own household.
A group of Boston philanthropists, influenced by seeing a cooking school in London, decided to open a school in 1879. They aimed to help people who wanted to cook for their families as well as those who wanted to become cooks for a living. A secondary aim was to be of particular benefit for those who were poor, such as the immigrants living in Boston's North End. The late 1800s was a boom time for immigration to the US; however, those who immigrated here often had a hard time coping with lack of economic opportunities as well as the strangeness of the new culture.
Mary Lincoln was one of the first persons hired to teach at the new Boston Cooking School and she later became its first principal. Being that cooking schools in the US were experimental, no textbooks nor teacher training was available. Mrs. Lincoln wrote The Boston Cook Book in 1884 to fill a void. As she wrote in her preface, "There is a special reason for the publication of this work. It is undertaken at the urgent request of the pupils of the Boston Cooking School, who have desired that the receipts and lessons given during the last four years in that institution should be arranged in a permanent form."
My 1902 copy appears to be the third edition. Mrs. Lincoln makes note of revisions to her original text, including the inclusion of new food products such as granulated gelatine and baking powder.
Mrs. Lincoln resigned from the Boston Cooking School in 1885, and went on to a busy career as a lecturer, teacher, author, magazine editor, and even celebrity endorser. She wrote The School Kitchen Textbook: Lessons in Cooking and Domestic Science as a textbook for beginners in the Boston Public Schools. This 1915 edition reflects its times with an emphasis on science and cleanliness.
Read more about Mrs. Lincoln on Michigan State University's website.
Pages from the School Kitchen Textbook:
