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"…Eating is something more than animal indulgence and…cooking has a nobler purpose than
the gratification of appetite and the sense of taste. Cooking has been defined as ‘the art
of preparing food for the nourishment of the human body.’" These words of Mary Lincoln, the
first director of the Boston Cooking School and a well-known
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an essential element of scientific cookery: the preparation and digestibility of
food were paramount while the actual taste of the food was secondary. The preparation of many dishes, particularly an abundance of bizarre salads, resulted in rigorously composed, tightly controlled presentations. Molded foods, from fish puddings to tomato aspic to jellied desserts were wildly popular, thanks to the convenience of a new product, granulated gelatin. For the sake of digestibility, vegetables were cooked nearly to a pulp. The recommended cooking time for spinach, for example, was 30 minutes. And then the spinach might be blanketed in white sauce, another popular food treatment. With digestibility as a goal, the advocates of scientific cookery viewed food preparation as "external digestion," the first step in the body’s absorption of nutrients. This belief resulted in elaborately garnished and decorated food, the purpose of which was to activate the salivary glands and thus initiate the digestive process. The recipes offered on this page, all from Fannie Farmer’s A New Book of Cookery (1917), will give curious readers a good sense of the dishes that were typical of classic scientific cookery. |
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Mann Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 Phone: 607-255-5406 Fax: 607-255-0318 Email: mann_ref@cornell.edu Ask a Librarian | Cornell University Library| Exhibits © Copyright 2004 |
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