• Fannie’s Last Supper will air as a public television pledge special in November 2010.
• Expected guests at the dinner party include Mark Bittman, Harry Smith, NPR’s Renee Montagne, and many other luminaries.
• America’s Test Kitchen and Cook's Country are watched by a combined audience of 3 million viewers per week on public television.
• Kimball is a regular contributor to the Today show, CBS's Early Show, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

Before The Joy of Cooking, there was The Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Written by Fannie Farmer, principal of the school, and published in 1896, it was the best-selling cookbook of its age. 400,000 copies were sold by Farmer’s death in 1915—and more than 4 million were sold by the 1960s. It perfectly encapsulates the late Victorian era, but it’s also surprisingly modern; in short, it’s ripe for reevaluation. And who better to conduct such an experiment than Chris Kimball, founder of Cook’s Illustrated and host of PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen?

Fannie’s Last Supper is the result. In it, Kimball assembles an extravagant twelve-course Christmas dinner from Farmer’s cookbook and serves it in an 1859 Boston townhouse, complete with an authentic Victorian home kitchen, uniformed maids, and a distinguished guest list. The menu includes Roast Goose with Potato Stuffing, Canton Punch, Three Molded Victorian Jellies, and Mandarin Cake. But Kimball includes more than just the dinner party’s dishes—Fannie’s Last Supper is a working cookbook with forty tested, rewritten, updated recipes drawn from Farmer’s opus.

It’s a culinary thriller of sorts, traveling back in time to reexamine something most of us take for granted: the American table.