Cooking Schools: Nineteenth Century

Four different types of cooking schools emerged in America during the nineteenth century. The first was an expansion of the pastry lessons offered by experts during the eighteenth century. The shift between private lessons and public courses was made by Elizabeth Goodfellow, who opened a pastry shop in Philadelphia in 1808. She subsequently offered lessons, which turned into formal classes offered to the public, and thus established America’s first cooking school. Goodfellow never published a cookbook, but her course of study is known through her students. One of her pupils, Eliza Leslie, collected Goodfellow’s recipes and published them as Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (1828). After Goodfellow’s death in 1851, the cookbook Cookery as It Should Be (1853) was compiled by an unidentified “pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow.” Despite Leslie’s complaints that many of the book’s recipes had not come from Goodfellow, the cookbook went through at least four editions.