Fannie's Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook by Chris Kimball

Jul 25, 2011 Sarah Keliher rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: food, read2010

It looked so promising: effusive cover blurbs, snappy synopsis, nice pre-publication cover art. I guess the cooking community is probably like the sci-fi community or the romance writing community - too small to criticize your fellow writers, even when they've produced something really bad. Or maybe Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook's Illustrated and the guy behind America's Test Kitchen, is the kind of man you don't want to cross. He sort of gives off that vibe, and surely there is a good re...more It looked so promising: effusive cover blurbs, snappy synopsis, nice pre-publication cover art. I guess the cooking community is probably like the sci-fi community or the romance writing community - too small to criticize your fellow writers, even when they've produced something really bad. Or maybe Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook's Illustrated and the guy behind America's Test Kitchen, is the kind of man you don't want to cross. He sort of gives off that vibe, and surely there is a good reason why this book is so poorly edited - maybe whatever luckless editor was assigned to whip this haphazard mess into shape was simply too intimidated to pull it off.
I don't mean to just blindly insult this book. As a work of history, it's a failure. Kimball spews an assortment of trivia and facts, some of it barely related and some of it outright irrelevant, hopping decades and sometimes centuries, at no point creating a cohesive picture. It reminded me at times of listening to a wikipedia-addicted nerd on a bad Mountain Dew jag (yes, I've been there); at others, of being trapped in a reference section with someone's genealogy-obsessed aunt (occupational hazard of bookselling). It's a pity, because there are some interesting tidbits jammed in there, but it's thankless work to fish them out. Especially annoying are Kimball's opinions expressed as facts - and herein lies the heart of his trouble with History as an actual genre. Kimball may have very good taste, but fails to see that taste is not an absolute, and cannot be removed from its context. For instance, historians tend to refrain from expressing their personal feelings about medieval food, though most would probably agree that it sounds really gross. I have cookbooks which tell me that fried sago grubs are delicious, something that might be true but which I will not put to the test, and I've been told that many cultures find our Western fixation on congealed blocks of moldy dairy products (aka cheese) to be absolutely vile. Taste is, as you see, relative.
This might seem obvious to you and to me, but not to Kimball. For instance, he compares Fannie to a Martha Stewart 'bereft of taste' and wastes a lot of page space mocking her sadly provincial and ham-handed approach to baking, sauces, and table decorations. He rather bizarrely and unfairly persists in comparing her - unfavorably, of course - to contemporary French cooks, who, being male and in France, were unarguably better-trained cooks. His dislike for poor Fannie runs so deep that, instead of re-creating her recipes, he liberally re-writes them, and sometimes replaces them outright. It starts to seem a little weird that someone with such an active dislike of Fannie Farmer would undertake such a project, and in fact we learn very little about Farmer (except, of course, that she was a crappy cook). Fannie, though, is just a convenient excuse for Kimball to try out his authentic Victorian cookstove in his authentic Victorian house. He does unbend enough to permit the use of blenders, refrigerators, and other modern appliances, rendering his claim to have authentically recreated a Victorian dinner even more dubious.
The snidely avuncular mockery of Fannie and her fellow Boston Cooking School cooks persists to the point where it begins to smack of sexism, despite Kimball's pointed inclusion of a woman on his cooking team. There's a particularly sad interlude towards the end where Kimball is describing an ice sculpture that he's had carved for the occasion. The sculpture, of a mermaid, is initially compared to Annie Sprinkle - but by the end of the dinner, Kimball snickers, she instead resembles a woman who has had two children.
It was at this point that I started to wonder what the editors had been thinking. Who is the target market for this sort of genteel food writing? Women. Middle-aged, middle class women, with an interest in food history and very possibly an affection for Fannie Farmer. Some may have had children, and may not enjoy being compared to a melting ice sculpture. I think that it will very likely sell well - in a tidy pile at the local Big Box Bookstore, it will probably look to a lot of guys like just the thing to get Mom for Christmas. Guys, please consider what this book might do to your mom's feelings.
But what about the food, right? These recipes are here to try to impress you, not to actually be attempted in your home. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you will run right out to buy a live turtle for boiling, or get a box of cow feet for gelatin. I think, though, that anyone so inclined probably already had some recipes on hand.
The last chapter - about modern convenience food and how it erodes our quality of life - is sad, thoughtful, and well-constructed. It softened up the edges of my rage a bit, but mostly made me wish the rest of the book had not been so awful.

PS I've since removed star no 2, because every time I shelve in the cookbook section and see this book I get annoyed all over again.(less)

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Feb 01, 2012 Alyson rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This book drove me nuts because I apparently had crazy expectations from the title that this was going to be the recreation of a historic meal. If you're going to recreate a meal from a historic period on a wood stove in your 1859 brick Victorian bowfront, THEN RECREATE IT. Don't mess around making it more palatable to modern tastes, and certainly don't constantly criticize the author of the recipes you're altering because she had different tastes in a different time period. Unfortunately, that'...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Jeff rated it 2 of 5 stars

I liked the idea of this book more than the execution. It is full of some interesting info about Victorian foods and customs, the history of Boston, the life of Fannie Farmer, and lots of other tangents related to the premise. But I found Mr. Kimball to be annoyingly snobbish and way too enamored of the word "ersatz". I swear I encountered that word more times in this one slim book than I have in my previous 45 years of existence. It also seemed that he didn't really "recreate" the amazing meal...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: foodie

Christopher Kimball takes on a project to recreate a 12-course Victorian dinner using Fannie Farmer's cookbook as a starting point. In undertaking this task, he goes on to describe the history of food and cultural context of Victorian era Boston.

I'm mildly familiar with Mr. Kimball through the PBS show, America's Test Kitchen. In the book (as it has been on the show), he displays the same tongue in cheek tone while continuing to show his breadth of knowledge about food and cooking techniques. I...more

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Jun 04, 2012 Pamela rated it 4 of 5 stars

I wrote this review on March 10,, 2011 for http://stylesubstancesoul.com/2011/03...:

When I think of culinary adventure, my mind wanders to trying a new type of cheese, baking dough that actually has to rise, or eating at a restaurant lauded by a magazine columnist. When Chris Kimball thinks of culinary adventure, he takes it a step further, going so far as to create an authentic 12-course Victorian meal in his own home! He took on the challenge to create this meal, and wrote about it in Fannie’s...more I wrote this review on March 10,, 2011 for http://stylesubstancesoul.com/2011/03...:

When I think of culinary adventure, my mind wanders to trying a new type of cheese, baking dough that actually has to rise, or eating at a restaurant lauded by a magazine columnist. When Chris Kimball thinks of culinary adventure, he takes it a step further, going so far as to create an authentic 12-course Victorian meal in his own home! He took on the challenge to create this meal, and wrote about it in Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook. The entire effort is also documented in a PBS documentary, and on the website with recipes and photos.

Kimball’s approach to the story of creating the meal is fascinating in unexpected ways; he ruminates on food history, researches technique and food sources, and regales the reader with the planning and execution of his glorious feast. He is amusing, clever, sarcastic, and thoroughly entertaining. His writing style flows through a variety of experiences, with a wry sense of humor, often causing me to laugh out loud, especially when he described how some of the old recipes turned out.

Mr. Kimball is a foodie going way back. He is the founder, editor, and publisher of Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines. He also hosts the television show, America’s Test Kitchen, and has published a variety of recipe books.

The “Fannie” of Fannie’s Last Supper is the one and only Fannie Farmer — cooking teacher and cookbook author from the late 18th & early 19th centuries. This book is as much the story of an amazing feast as it is a biography of this controversial and fascinating woman who brought new techniques and methods of cooking into the homes of America during an age when the world was changing rapidly. She was a successful businesswoman, with an eye toward the science and health of cooking.

When Kimball and his wife purchased an old “bow-front townhouse” in Boston in the mid-1990’s, they decided to refurbish the kitchen in the original Victorian style, complete with an authentic coal cookstove. A fascination with the history of cooking led Kimball to experiment with original preparation methods for foods of the times. Fannie Farmer’s cookbook from 1896 included a 12-course menu that Kimball used as the basis for his “Last Supper.”

Kimball introduces us to the history of home food cooking trends in Boston in the 18th and 19th centuries. He brings in fascinating trivia about the development of culinary arts, including the history of the Boston waterfront and how the shipping industry impacted the city in the early 18th century, how changes in availability of domestic help impacted the American kitchen, and the challenges of food preparation before modern conveniences. These aren’t subjects I thought I was particularly interested in but, in the capable hands of Chris Kimball, the history takes on relevance and lends itself to the appreciation of good food and food preparation.

I’d have a hard time choosing my favorite stories from the book, as it incorporates so many surprising tidbits of information, from a very funny synopsis of how and why it is important to delicately remove the brains from a calf’s head when making turtle soup, to anecdotes of social and culinary clubs of Boston’s past. Kimball explains cooking techniques, from larding to daubing, barding and rendering. He even reviews a history of the development of cookbooks. He discusses famous chefs from America’s past as well as modern day culinary experts. As expected, the description of some foods made my mouth water – - including Duxelle & Chicken-filled Rissoles, Potatoes Lyonnaise, Lobster a l’Americaine, and Fried Baby Artichokes; others made my stomach turn!

There is so much to enjoy in this book; it is a truly pleasurable experience to join Kimball on his journey to create Fannie’s Last Supper. As Kimball says, “Researching history is a terrific way to cure oneself of taking anything for granted.”
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Mar 16, 2012 Marie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc

This one gets a big 'eh' from me. While I usually love eclectic cooking, history, Victorian customs hybrid books, this one never grabbed my attention. The premise of the book was that Kimball - of some sort of cooking show fame - was going to take an 1896 cook book and create his own replication of a 12 course meal. The project lasted two years. Two years! I was bored after two chapters!

I just didn't feel as if Kimball stuck to his own plan. He goes into a lot of detail about the creator of the...more

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Nov 18, 2011 Alyce (At Home With Books) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Fannie’s Last Supper is the account of Chris Kimball’s attempt to recreate a traditional twelve course meal using Fannie Farmer’s cookbook. Included in the book are the author’s versions of the recipes that he adapted from Fannie Farmer. In addition to the recipes and cooking stories are histories of: Boston’s culinary tradition, the mechanics of cooking in the 1800s, foods of the time, and the marketplace (or lack thereof).

To be honest, I was disappointed in this book. I was expecting it to be...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Ashland Mystery Oregon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: culinary-narratives

The continuity in the narrative is found in Kimball's preparation for a 12 course Victorian supper based on Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook. The genesis of the narrative is the Boston home that Kimball and his wife bought, in Farmer's neighborhood along with the restoration of the home, gentrification of the neighborhood, and the research to understand the times and culture of Victorian Boston. Farmer's contribution to culinary history and to cooking are explored, and clarified. Some of the foods...more

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Jan 16, 2011 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, library_books, food-and-drink

I thought it a terrific read -- whenever I put it down, I looked forward to returning for the next course. I'd not heard of the author, and his television program, before starting the book, which I think worked out for the best. I found him funny, and self-effacing, far from a "celebrity" with attitude; he makes a point of mentioning that he does his share of the "drudge" work, not mentioning a celebrity connection at all until the dinner at the end, where he can hardly not mention the famous gu...more

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Dec 22, 2010 Jenne rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I've always thought Chris Kimball was kind of a smug bastard, with his glurgey "Letters from Vermont" and his self-satisfied bowtie and his over-engineered recipes.
This book didn't do much to dispel that impression, and also showed that any organizational skill he might have in the kitchen does not translate to his writing.

He loves making lists of things (like, every other sentence is a list of stuff), and telling you pointless facts, like why you should build your chimney inside the house, and...more

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May 31, 2012 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: other-cooking, geo-vic-edw-eras

I learned so much from this book about circa 1890 food preparation & taste preferences (hence four stars from me), & lots of little historical tidbits kept me reading. There is probably no chance that I will ever make any of the recipes but I also do not intend to host a modernized Victorian dinner party either. I wasn’t reading this to learn to cook like Fannie Farmer but so that I could learn how she would have, & what people were eating in the 1890s.

The occasional snide remark (w...more

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May 15, 2011 Laura rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: food, library-books

This book had all the raw ingredients to appeal to me: cooking and eating, history, Boston, architecture, a nineteenth-century woman (Fannie Farmer). But the preparation & presentation went horribly wrong. I must agree with a number of other reviews here that Kimball is profoundly disdainful of Farmer's recipes, which makes one wonder why he would take on the project of creating a 12-course dinner based on her cookbook? In the few instances when he discovers Farmer knew how to do something a...more This book had all the raw ingredients to appeal to me: cooking and eating, history, Boston, architecture, a nineteenth-century woman (Fannie Farmer). But the preparation & presentation went horribly wrong. I must agree with a number of other reviews here that Kimball is profoundly disdainful of Farmer's recipes, which makes one wonder why he would take on the project of creating a 12-course dinner based on her cookbook? In the few instances when he discovers Farmer knew how to do something as well as, or better than, he does, he expresses surprise. The book becomes a sort of critical review of Farmer's cookbook, as if it were a current publication he's testing, instead of a window into the past. For the first 40-odd pages I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would "update" Victorian food to some extent. But whenever he doesn't like something about Farmer's cookbook, he snorts knowingly and proceeds to "correct" it (ie, change it in accord with his own personal, 21st century taste), or he simply substitutes another recipe by some one he likes better (preferably by a male French chef). He shudders at the idea of cooking without "modern appliances" even though he has lots of help in the kitchen. He can't conceive of anyone who would actually like a white sauce on fish, so he decides on Grilled Salmon as a fish course even though he admits Farmer's American contemporaries didn't grill fish. He finds Farmer's cake recipes universally horrid so he makes something from L'Epicure instead. He asks Gordon Hammersly for advice on cooking lobster. More examples abound. As a result, Kimball fails utterly in recreating a late 19th c. dinner, much less in understanding how late 19th c. Americans ate or what their relationship to food was like. He professes admiration for Farmer as a teacher and business person but he never grasps who her students really were (neither servants nor elite women). He overlooks Boston's rich history as the center of 19th c. intellectual life and radical reform (transcendentalism, abolitionism, women's rights) in favor of its stereotype as a stuffy starchy town. The text is further marred by repetition, disorganization,digression, and sexism. I may try a couple of his recipes but most are there just for drama, impractical for any home cook today to attempt. (One thing I liked, to be fair, is the care with which Kimball traced the types of ingredients with which Farmer would have been working, from the average weight of geese to the variety of pears.)

If this topic interests you, I highly recommend instead Harvey Levenstein's _Revolution at the Table_ (incredibly missing from Kimball's bibliography) and Laura Shapiro's _Perfection Salad_. And for cooking one's way through an iconic, influential cookbook, this is a poor successor indeed to _Julie and Julia_.(less)

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Nov 22, 2010 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: cooking-food

When Chris Kimball moved into a 1859 Victorian house in the South End of Boston he wondered what it would have been like to have lived and cooked in that time period. So, with the help of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cook Book and other cook books of the era, Kimball decides to cook and host an authentic twelve course Victorian dinner party in his home. Each chapter discusses a course and what food and cooking were like in the Victorian era, plus how Kimball was faring with testing reci...more

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Nov 02, 2010 Dana Stabenow rated it 3 of 5 stars

Christopher Kimball, whom I know well from my subscription to Cook's Illustrated, finds an old cookbook in an older house and spends two years figuring out how to put on a Victorian spread for twelve, using a coal stove, no less. Along the way we are treated to a history of Boston by way of fresh oysters and calf's foot jelly, in Fannie Farmer's kitchen.

I love The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, it is my go-to cookbook whenever I pull something unidentifiable out of the freezer and need a recipe to put...more

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Oct 13, 2010 Margaret rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: nobody

Shelves: food-writing, arc, authors-kl

I was excited to read this, because I love Cook's Illustrated (which Kimball founded) and I thought food history plus the Cook's Illustrated approach to cooking would be neat. Unfortunately, I disliked so many things about it that I almost don't know where to start.

First, the book is positioned as a tribute to Fannie Farmer, yet Kimball has no respect for her. He refers to her constantly as not much of a cook, but as a great businesswoman. He calls her "middle class at best". He denies her claim...more I was excited to read this, because I love Cook's Illustrated (which Kimball founded) and I thought food history plus the Cook's Illustrated approach to cooking would be neat. Unfortunately, I disliked so many things about it that I almost don't know where to start.

First, the book is positioned as a tribute to Fannie Farmer, yet Kimball has no respect for her. He refers to her constantly as not much of a cook, but as a great businesswoman. He calls her "middle class at best". He denies her claim to being "the mother of level measurements" based on little more evidence than his feeling that the claim is "apocryphal". And he just flat-out doesn't like her recipes.

Kimball not only rewrites the recipes he does use (which I was expecting), he often uses some other recipe entirely: for example, the lobster l'Americaine is based on Gordon Ramsay's recipe. Fannie Farmer's cake recipes are "rather uninspired", so off he goes to an 1888 French cake book for Mandarin Cake instead. The subtitle ought to be "Creating One Amazing Meal from a Couple of Recipes in Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook and Lots of Other Recipes I Like More". A lot of the recipes do look good, but making a bunch of non-Fannie Farmer recipes is simply not what the book is purporting to be about.

Kimball may be a good cook, but he's certainly not a historian. Each chapter begins with a little historical essays on some aspect of 19th-century cooking, Fannie Farmer, or Boston generally. The essays are disorganized and packed full of unrelated factoids; often the entire essay has little or nothing to do with the rest of the chapter. Why do we need to read three pages on Boston clubs, for instance (other than to find out that Kimball belongs to one)? Every once in a while he would hit on a pertinent topic, like Boston farmers' markets, and I would read those with interest, but even these bits often devolved into long paragraphs of factoids, unconnected facts, and unwarranted assumptions.

But the worst thing about these historical discourses is that Kimball seems to have very little real sense of the period he's writing about. If he doesn't understand it, he thinks it's silly; if their taste is different from ours, it's bad taste; if it's something that doesn't fit into his view of the period (such as their interest in hygiene and chemistry), it's surprisingly "modern". He mocks an early recipe for Indian pudding as "silly" because it directs the cook to let the molasses drop in while singing a verse of "Nearer My God to Thee" (in cold weather, sing two verses). Does he not understand that in an era without measuring spoons or kitchen timers, this is a perfectly reasonable way of measuring molasses?

And he doesn't just have a limited perspective when it comes to the past. The problem extends into the present as well and results in a host of prejudiced remarks. As I've already mentioned, he uses "middle class" as a derogatory term to describe both Fannie and her recipes. He has an ice sculpture of a mermaid to decorate his dinner party; it starts out sporting "spectacular breasts, somewhere on a continuum between the Little Mermaid and Annie Sprinkle" and ends up resembling "a naked woman who has had at least two kids." When he buys calf's heads to make homemade gelatin and ends up with ten instead of two, he wonders why the butcher has so many and speculates: "Was this for some ethnic specialty perhaps, an Ecuadorian feast or a Cambodian stew? Were they being used in some sort of bestial ritual, voodoo or some darker, more sinister rite?" I'm sorry, but did you just equate ethnic food with bestial rituals?

I could go on -- I left many pages dogeared to mark bits I didn't like -- but I think you get the idea by now. So if you're an upper-middle-class white male foodie with a very limited worldview, then possibly this book is for you. If you're not, it probably isn't. It certainly wasn't for me.
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Feb 10, 2011 Anna added it · review of another edition

I thought the premise of this book was really interesting, and I did enjoy reading about the process of making the meal and some of the historical background; however, it seemed that Kimball abandoned his premise very quickly. Why bother describing it as an effort to recreate a meal from a particular Victorian cookbook when you don't actually use any of the recipes? For all the background about Fannie Farmer, Kimball did not seem to think her cooking was actually worthy of being brought back to...more

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Jan 18, 2011 Richard rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book's premise - the preparation of a 12 course feast based on nothing more than recipes taken from a 1896 Fannie Farmer cookbook - grabbed me as interesting; an Iron Chef crossed with 1900 House, if you will. And that subject *was* interesting as Kimball decoded 100 year old recipes and set out to collect the unusual ingredients these hopelessly outdated instructions asked for (a calf's head and brains for mock turtle soup, calf's feet for 19th century jello, etc.) Also interesting was the...more

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Nov 05, 2010 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars

I appreciated the illuminating history of domestic/culinary life in Boston up to and including the Victorian era. I thought this was superb. This history was intwined with the author's crusade to recreate an authentic dinner party for a dozen guests. The author put me completely behind the authentic cast iron stove he installed in his victorian townhome. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book and look forward to viewing his television special, based on this book, this holiday season. I did find that I...more

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Nov 26, 2010 Rachel Rogers rated it 4 of 5 stars

Having worked in a Victorian House museum for 10 years, I really connected with this book. Plus, I love to cook myself and have a copy of the Fannie Merritt Farmer 1896 edition on my shelf. Kimball used his experience in test kitchens to tell the stories of putting together this dinner, what worked and what didn't, as well as the social history of Boston and cooking in the late Victorian era. Most of the recipes were fascinating, even though I had no desire to eat them myself. My only real probl...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Sara Salfrank rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: resolution-finish-what-i-ve-got

I was fascinated by this story (which Mark Bittman aptly describes as “part history and part contemporary journalism”) of a two-year-long effort to reproduce an authentic Victorian dinner. Americana for the foodie, this is a well-written and engaging look at how we did one of the most basic human things- preparing our food- over 100 years ago and why we do it differently now. As someone who owns and occasionally thumbs through an old copy of the Boston Cooking School cookbook, I would recommend...more

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Jan 25, 2012 Diane C. rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's true, Chris Kimball is a rather self involved, smug and self congratulatory person, and this project seems rather specious. But the historical parts of this book are truly interesting. My son's paternal relatives are from the Boston area of Brookline, and I found this fascinating.

I do like the comment from one reviewer on this site about the over engineered recipes. I have found that rather annoying about Cook's Classics.

The descriptions of what people ate in the 17th, 18th and 19th century...more

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Jun 11, 2011 Kathryn Daugherty rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Food Historians, Victorians

Shelves: food

I love Cook's Illustrated and I even love Chris Kimball's small essays at the beginning of every issue, but taking his smug, self-congratulatory tone through a novella length work is less appealing. He claims to want to recreate a Victorian era, elegant dinner party by using recipes of the era, specifically from The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. Unfortunately he hates Fanny Farmer and he hates her recipes. He keeps some of her ideas when it will create a clever story that he can make fun of, but he tra...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Simone Lehmann added it

Simultaneously an investigation into the history of cookery in America, an exploration of Victorian cooking methods and fads, and a biography of Fannie Farmer, America's first hugely successful cooking authority - although she was admittedly a better marketer than a chef. Author Christopher Kimball sets out to recreate a 12-course Victoria meal in his renovated Victorian home in Boston: from the ingredients to the tools, he does it all as authentically as possible. Fascinating and often hilariou...more

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Jun 21, 2011 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

The title's a bit misleading, as with almost every course they decided that Fannie's recipe was just not going to cut it and they modified and lightened and otherwise made it palatable to modern tastes. Nonetheless, there's a fair amount of interesting history about foodstuffs in the 19th century, and the travails of learning to cook on a coal stove. I also shudder to think how much all the ingredients cost, for their many tests and final, 4.5 hour dinner. Some of the food sounded quite good. I...more

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Mar 30, 2012 Kate rated it 1 of 5 stars

Finally got through it, just to say I did. Still convinced that Kimball is full of it. The contrast between his "down to earth Vermont farmer" personality and his "using 'middle-class' as an insult while eating food served to him on gold-rimmed plates in his pimped-out Victorian home" personality is just too much to deal with.

He's also not much of a historian - sure, the facts might be there, but he has no clue how to organize and present them, so he keeps talking in circles, describing almost...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Barb rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical_cookery

If Mr. Kimball had actually done what the title of the book implies that he did (create an amazing meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook), I think I would have enjoyed it a great deal. As it stands, he spends an inordinate amount of time telling us why Mrs. Farmer's recipes are inferior to nearly anyone else's, and then proceeds to pretty much make whatever he pleases. I nearly put this book aside unfinished, because I was so annoyed at it. In the end, I finished it only to see if Mr. Kimball...more

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Feb 07, 2011 Ilze rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I got this book because it claimed to be about something I always wanted to do: Host a historical dinner prepared as per the time period chosen.

Now I see that actually doing the loads of work that would be involved would probably put a big damper on any enjoyment I might get out of it.

So, no problem, I would really like to just attend a historical dinner prepared as per the time chosen. Anybody doing one? No?

So okay, I'm not going to be invited to one of these fetes soon, if they actually exist....more

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Feb 14, 2011 Dixie Diamond rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1890s, cookbooks, history, women, borrowed_books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Read this and this.

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Note: I lost time by not thinking of it quickly enough, but I did get a copy of the 1896 Farmer cookbook to use for reference while I was reading this

* * * * * * * * * *

I could go on for pages and pages here, but I'll try to keep it sane.

I don't quite understand this. Kimball sets out to host a dinner party in his "1859 Victorian bow-front" (he says it repeatedly) using the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book . . . and then doesn't. Why would he go to...more

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Nov 30, 2010 Eliza rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, library-book

This was very interesting, but I thought the research and conclusions drawn were a little all over the place. Kimball did a very good job of highlighting just how much and how quickly technology has changed in the last 150 years. It's a little mind-boggling. Not watching America's Test Kitchen, I think I was a little lost on Kimball's seemingly conflicting desires to make exactly what Fanny Farmer would have made but also to make it better. That said, I did bookmark a couple recipes in there.

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Sep 02, 2011 Catherine Woodman rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is Chris Kimball's telling of reproducing a 19th century meal in his 19th century house--which sounded a lot better than it was. I think it would be great fun to see his house (although the scale of the rooms looks bigger than the scale of our rooms based on the dining room picture--and it was definitely a grander house than ours). But the meal? Nothing about it I wanted to repeat--the reason I gave this 3 stars rather than less is that I did learn something about 19th century cooking.

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Fannie's Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook

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Books by Chris Kimball

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Trivia About Fannie's Last Sup...

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Other Editions (5)