The introductory texts reproduced here were written by the original Feeding America team to contextualize the books that were selected for inclusion as part of the 2001 digitization project.
Food And Cookery For The Sick And Convalescent, By Fannie Merritt Farmer.
Boston, Little, Brown And Company, 1904.
Although history best remembers Fannie Farmer for her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), Fannie herself thought her greatest contribution would be this book, Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. This was the book she was most proud of and the one upon which she thought her reputation would rest.
Fannie had suffered a paralytic stroke in her teens, was bedridden for months and remained an invalid for years thereafter, recovered enough to walk with a limp for the rest of her life and spent her last several years teaching and lecturing from a wheelchair. Perhaps because of her own illness, she had always had an interest in cooking for invalids.
She supplied lectures on that subject to training schools for nurses nationwide and lectured on nutrition at the Harvard Medical School. Her work there brought her into contact with Dr. Elliott Joslin, the pioneer diabetes researcher, who credited Fannie as "the stimulus which started me in writing about diabetes."
There is much on the role of diet in general and for special diseases. There is so much in the way of scientific and nutritional information (now, of course, superceded), that there is a special index of technical and descriptive materials. The recipes in this book cover all parts of the meal, from Brandy Albumen and Almond Tarts to White Corn Meal Cake and Zweiback.
