The Fannie Farmer Cookbook — 1965 Little Brown 11th Ed

📖 The Fannie Farmer Cookbook — the Eleventh Edition (Little, Brown, 1965), revised and enlarged by Wilma Lord Perkins: the book that made standardized level measurements the rule of the American kitchen, revised for mid-century cooking. This copy is a hardcover in its original dust jacket (price-clipped), graded Good+/Very Good- (book) and Good-/Good (jacket) — full report below.

QUICK FACTS

• Author: Fannie Merritt Farmer (1857–1915); revised by Wilma Lord Perkins
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Boston / Toronto (simultaneously in Canada)
• Year: 1965 — Eleventh Edition, revised and enlarged (LCCN 65-25022)
• Format: Hardcover with dust jacket (price-clipped)
• Pages: 545+ (Index begins p. 545) | ISBN: None — pre-ISBN printing
• Condition: Book: Good+/VG- ; Jacket: Good-/Good — full report below

THE BOOK

Fannie Merritt Farmer, who ran the Boston Cooking School, published its cookbook in 1896 and became the first writer to insist on standardized level measurements — the precision that let any cook reproduce her results exactly. The book was an immediate best-seller (the 1965 back panel claims it outsold the popular novels of the day at the turn of the century) and has never been out of print. After Farmer’s death in 1915 the book passed to the Perkins family, relatives by marriage, who revised it roughly every six years. Wilma Lord Perkins edited the lineage from 1929 to 1975, testing every recipe — by the Eleventh Edition’s account, in three kitchens on different types of stoves.

THIS EDITION

The 1965 Eleventh Edition was billed on the back panel as “the most complete revision to date,” carrying copyright lines stretching from 1896 through 1965. New features listed on the flap include recipes from Fish House Punch to Greek Lemon Soup, expanded notes on ingredients, more on cocktails and wine service, make-ahead entertaining suggestions, design improvements for a lighter, easier-to-reference page, and endpaper reference charts for roasting temperatures and times, equivalents, and substitutions — the roasting timetable and substitutions pages are photographed in this listing.

COVER & DESIGN

The dust jacket is designed by Paul Bacon (1923–2015), the jazz musician and book-jacket designer who created some 6,500 jackets over fifty years and defined the mid-century “Big Book Look” — his other commissions included the hardcovers of Compulsion and Jaws. His Fannie Farmer jacket is deliberately plain-spoken: cream stock, brown serif type, a circular “America’s Basic Cookbook” emblem with an Ff monogram, and “Over three million copies in print” across the foot; the back panel carries the edition’s history in question-and-answer form plus the publisher’s full-refund guarantee. Interior line drawings are by Alison Mason Kingsbury, credited on the title page. Contents run from cooking methods and seasonings through beverages, hors d’oeuvres, soups, sauces, eggs, fish, meats, poultry, salads, breads, pastry, cakes, frozen desserts, candies, preserves, canning, and a Table of Calories, with the index at p. 545.

WHY IT MATTERS

• The direct ancestor of modern American cookbook writing — Farmer’s level-measurement system is the reason American recipes list cups and spoons at all
• Over three million copies in print by 1965; the jacket flap quotes Holiday magazine: “No cookbook in the English language has ever had such a long life in print”
• A working record of changing American food habits across seven decades — twelve-course formal dinners of 1896 give way to mid-century informal entertaining and cocktail culture

FREQUENTLY ASKED

What edition is this? The Eleventh Edition, revised and enlarged, published by Little, Brown in 1965 (LCCN 65-25022) — the last traditional line of revision before the book was thoroughly reworked in the 1970s.

What condition is it in? Graded Good+/Very Good- for the book and Good-/Good for the jacket, with annotations noted throughout — the full graded report follows below.

Is the dust jacket included? Yes — present, price-clipped, with the chipping and tears at the upper edge described in the condition report.

FOR COLLECTORS

An honest working copy of the edition most cooks of the 1960s and ’70s actually used: Fannie Farmer’s tested method, Perkins’s careful updating, a Paul Bacon jacket, and the publisher’s guarantee panel still printed on the back. The annotations left by a previous owner are part of its seventy-year kitchen biography.

Book Details

• Author: Fannie Merritt Farmer (Revised by Wilma Lord Perkins)
• Illustrator: Alison Mason Kingsbury (Drawings); Paul Bacon (Dust Jacket Design)
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (Boston / Toronto)
• Binding: HARDCOVER
• Edition Points: Eleventh Edition, Revised and Enlarged (Copyright 1965). LCCN 65-25022. Retains original dust jacket with publisher’s order code 274542.

Condition Report

• Overall Grade: Book: Good+ (G+)/Very Good- (VG-) // Jacket: Good- (G-)/Good (G)
• Cover & Spine: Semi-metallic gold textured cloth boards with brown spine lettering remain sturdy with shelf rubbing and waer to spine ends. Board corners are fairly crisp with surface wear at tips. Spine is tanned and has a vertical crease for the length.
• Dust Jacket: Present; flaps are creased. Upper edge shows a fair amount of chipping and tears with some losses. Spine is tanned along with upper edge front and back. Price clipped.
• Text Block & Pages: Outer edge shows some soling, upper sprayed edge fairly well dusted. Rear free end paper and paste down are spattered. Some annotations sprinkled throughout with several lines in the back of the rear index.
• Binding: Structurally sound; hinges are solid, not cracked. Block closes tightly.

See accompanying images for full condition details. Will ship promptly, carefully packaged.

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