In 1972 a 50-year-old American woman managed to overcome her agoraphobia and journey from her farm in Walnut Creek, Oakland to Oregon to attend cooking classes given by the famous food writer James Beard.
Clearly she impressed Beard because she spent the next decade working as his assistant and helping him set up cooking classes in the Bay Area.
Beard was delighted with her never-ending enthusiasm for food and people.
When the time came to revise one of the American bibles of cooking, Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Beard had no hesitation in recommending his assistant for the job. And so in the late 1970s Marion Cunningham took on the mammoth task of revising a book first published in 1896. The 1918 edition was the last authored completely by Farmer.
Beard wrote of Cunningham: “Her background knowledge of good cooking, her boundless curiosity, her sense for the roots of this country’s culinary traditions, and her extraordinarily fine palate seemed to me to make her eminently qualified to take on this demanding assignment.”
Cunningham was joined by Jeri Laber who worked out the book’s structure and collaborated in its writing. And so America’s great basic cookbook was completely revised and appeared as The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
Every recipe in the new edition – which ran to more than 800 pages – was tested and many more were excluded. Its 1839 recipes are blessedly free of pre-made ingredients that come in tins, jars and packets such as populate many of today’s US recipes.
As Cunningham noted in the book’s preface, “We have recommended the use of timesaving appliances when they do the job well, but have avoided the kind of shortcut method that calls for a can of mushroom soup, for instance, to masquerade as a sauce.”
This week Marion Cunningham died at the age of 90. In latter years she had Alzheimer’s disease and lived in an assisted-care home in Walnut Creek before being admitted to hospital with respiratory problems.
Her legacy will remain – turning one great culinary classic into another.
I acquired my 1979 hardback copy of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook from a secondhand bookshop in Christchurch about 12 years ago. In almost mint condition, it was a bargain at $NZ20 and is still a wonderful resource today.
The revised edition is still available from the US through online booksellers. A copy of the original 1896 book was republished in the US this year. (Click pictures for links)