She may or may not be a household name in your household or even in your parents', but she likely was in your grandmother's. As The Fannie Farmer Cookbook turns 112 years young, it is the perfect opportunity to visit, re-visit or learn about this important name in the domestic arts. American cooking would not be the same without Fannie Farmer. So who was she and how did she have this much impact? Fannie Merritt Farmer was born in 1857 in Medford, MA. After a childhood that included a paralyzing stroke, Farmer enrolled in the famous Boston Cooking School at the age of 30. The Boston Cooking School was known for teaching the science of cooking as well as its art, and it was here that Farmer's influence on the domestic sciences began. Farmer, considered one of the school's star alumna, became its principal in 1891, and in 1896 published The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (which was, to be fair, a revision of the earlier Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book).
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was groundbreaking; in addition to almost 2,000 recipes, it contained direction on housekeeping, canning and preserving, nutrition and the science of cooking. It also contained exact measures, a convention that we take for granted but which was revolutionary at a time when recipes (or receipts, as they were often known) contained such direction as "about twenty-five drops of liquid," "a common-size tumbler" or (my favorite) "two jills." Curiously (except, perhaps, to writers), the publisher was not optimistic about the book's success and ordered a short run.
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