One woman’s fondness for cooking encouraged a standardized system of measure and a cookbook which has found a place in American homes for over a century.
Fannie Merritt Farmer was born in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts, the first of four girls in her family. Though it was not common for the times, her parents strongly promoted education and expected their daughters to attend college. Paralysis during her teenage years prevented young Fannie from continuing her education. She stayed home and helped there instead. Finally at age 30, Fannie was considered well enough to try a job outside of her family’s home. She became a governess to a prominent Boston family. It was there that her life’s course would change direction.
Encouraged by the family to learn more about cooking, Fannie enrolled in the respected Boston Cooking School, an institution designed to help women find work as cooks in a time when job options were limited for them. Fannie excelled at the school, graduating in 1889 and then staying on staff immediately after. The school taught more than simple cooking; it also focused on home economics such as nutrition, sanitation, chemical analysis, and household management. Fannie embraced this method wholeheartedly and would make it the basis of her future work.
In 1896 Fannie published her first cookbook, a revision of the school’s former president’s work which stood out as a modern method to cooking. Instead of “a heaping handful” or “a large coffee mug” of an ingredient, she presented a standard of measure as essential to ensure the best results in cooking. Her book, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer, was not expected to sell much by its publishers; they only printed 3000 copies. It proved them wrong and is in its thirteenth edition, now known as The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, most recently updated in 1990. In her lifetime, more than 360,000 copies of the book were printed in five different languages. Its simple and straightforward way of presenting recipes was key to its success. The book also included the skills women had previously been taught in their mothers’ kitchens, which had occurred less as a result of the Industrial Revolution. This made her book different from all which came before it.
Following the publication, she became a lecturer before opening her own cooking school to train housewives in 1902. At Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, Fannie focused on nutrition to help those who were sick. She even taught about the topic at Harvard Medical School, one of the first women to lecture at the school. Fannie then published what she felt was her most important work, Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. This was her most personal book, likely as a result of her own previous illness. She co-edited a cooking page in the Women’s Home Companion with her sister, continuing to lecture until just before her death. The Michigan State University Digital Repository has her entire original book available online here. My bookshop has a reprint of it available for purchase here, as well as the newest edition and other books. This is an affiliate link; thank you for supporting my work.