I'm not sure what I expected this to be but it was rather boring. Recipes in it are not for the everyday cook. You would have to have a lot of $$$, space and kitchen stuff to make these recipes. Of course, they are historical recipes when people had staff to cook this stuff so I get that but all in all trying to re-create a Victorian feast wasn't all that exciting. ( )

Adult nonfiction/ culinary history. Interesting account by Christopher Kimball (of America's Test Kitchen) of author's recreation of late 19th-century feast, including historical tidbits about cooking and the city of Boston. ( )

I should have listened to the other reviewers before buying this. Bottom line is, in the end he DOES NOT recreate a Fanny Farmer menu.

Kimball doesn't like 19th century food, so he makes 21st century variations on it. He seems amazed any time her recipes are good. Having roasted a fair number of geese in my time, I agree that it takes more effort than Fanny says -- but not nearly the amount of fiddling that he does. AND I have a lovely whole bird to be carved at table.

He gets a lot of things wrong. For example: on p.147 I don't know where he got the molasses apple pie from (not Fanny), and it may call for cassia, but that is a kind of cinnamon, not a thickener from which tapioca is made.

His remarks about England show a lack of understanding about languages - No, the British don't get English 'wrong', they just use a different version with different words for some meanings and different meanings for some words. Speaking of which, can late 19th century Boston really be said to be Victorian?

And then he doesn't even bother to print most of the recipes. No, I am not going to bother going to his website. ( )

Mark Bittman called this book, "Part history and part contemporary journalism," and I would add to that, part food memoir and part cookbook. There's a lot going on here. Fannie's Last Supper by Chris Kimball is made up of interweaving stories about Victorian-era Boston, modern-day Boston, and Kimball's spectacular and somewhat baffling attempt to recreate a high-society Victorian-style meal (complete with many equally baffling recipes). Think Downton Abbey with more historical context and set in Boston in 2009.

I love the Victorian era: I love reading about it, watching movies and shows about it, listening to podcasts about it. Really. Love. So, take a book about Victorian history and add in food – recreating Victorian dishes, restoring an authentic Victorian kitchen, etc. – and I should be in heaven, right? Well, in the case of this book, the answer is…sorta.

More here: http://booklovercook.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/booklovercook-reviews-fannies-last... ( )

In the mid-1990s, Chris Kimball moved into an 1859 Victorian townhouse on the South End of Boston and, as he became accustomed to the quirks and peculiarities of the house and neighborhood, he began to wonder what it was like to live and cook in that era. In particular, he became fascinated with Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Published in 1896, it was the best-selling cookbook of its age--full of odd, long-forgotten ingredients, fascinating details about how the recipes were concocted, and some truly amazing dishes (as well as some awful ones).

In Fannie's Last Supper, Kimball describes the experience of re-creating one of Fannie Farmer's amazing menus: a twelve-course Christmas dinner that she served at the end of the century. Kimball immersed himself in composing twenty different recipes--including rissoles, Lobster l'Amricaine, Roast Goose with Chestnut Stuffing and Jus, and Mandarin Cake--with all the inherent difficulties of sourcing unusual animal parts and mastering many now-forgotten techniques, including regulating the heat on a coal cookstove and boiling a calf's head without its turning to mush, all sans food processor or oven thermometer. Kimball's research leads to many hilarious scenes, bizarre tastings, and an incredible armchair experience for any reader interested in food and the Victorian era. ( )