How Fannie Farmer’s Precise Measurements Revolutionized Home Cooking

And we continue with our American Stories. This is the story about Fanny Farmer, the mother of level measurements. Take it away, break hanger.

Cooking in the late eighteen hundreds was unpredictable, tiresome, and difficult. Recipes were passed down in families, but often contained vague, if any, actual measurements. If the ingredients were named, home cooks might have been directed to add a pinch or a dash, or to make a pie crust. On January seventh, eighteen ninety-six, a young woman from Boston changed everything when she published her first cookbook.

Looking Maga food. Now, that’s the thing that you do.

Now, Dan, you’re ready to big. Fanny Merritt Farmer’s self-published Home, the eighteen ninety-six Boston Cooking School Cookbook, was six hundred pages and contained almost fifteen hundred recipes and sold for two dollars. I asked Ken Albala, Professor of History and Food Studies at University of the Pacific in California, if what history says about Fanny Farmer is accurate.

Fanny Farmer is usually credited with having introduced measurements to cooking, and a list of ingredients, and basically the modern recipe format. That’s not quite true. There were measurements before, and in fact, some authors use precise measurements five centuries before. What she does introduce is the level measuring cups. So, if you take a cup of flour or sugar or something, she says to use the flat end of a knife and scrape it off to get a level measure. And the assumption was that cooking is not an art; it’s a science, and that if you get your measurements exact, you’re going to have the same results every time, which, of course, is not true because ovens are erratic and ingredients change depending on the weather. Flour, especially, really most of the world measure measures it by weight. For some reason in the U.S., and my instinct says, and I can’t really prove this, but is that we had people selling measuring cups. And that’s why I caught on in the U.S., is that we assumed, you know, every time you scoop a cup of flour, as long as you give it a level measure, somehow it’s going to come out to be the same thing all the time. And, you know, that’s just a pretense, and it matters in baking perhaps, but certainly no other type of cooking doesn’t really matter how much you throw in of everything. So, our reputation in that respect is a little skewed, I would say. I think what is fascinating about her is Coursetion was a businesswoman, you know, and she’d didn’t found the Boston Cooking School. She inherited it from Mrs. Lincoln, who actually even had a cookbook preceding hers, but for some reason, hers is the one that called on. The publishers didn’t think it would. In fact, they made her pay for the first print run, which is sort of, sort of not a nice thing to do for an author. It says, “We don’t really trust you,” but, you know, “maybe if you make the money, we’ll, we’ll publish it, but you have to take the risk.” And the irony of it is, of course, it sold millions of copies, and she got all the— She held the copyright, so she got all the profits, and that not the publisher.

Fanny Farmer’s cookbook sold over four million copies during her lifetime. Fanny planned on going to college, but a stroke at the age of sixteen left her paralyzed and forced her to stay at home. Eventually, she would walk again, though she would always maintain a limb. Here’s Professor Albala. And,

I think it’s probably why. After doing the cookbook, which is very well known, she did a book of convalescent cookery, what you should see sick people. And, of course, the idea—I’ve actually, this is something I’ve actually written about. So the only thing I can speak of, you know, with direct authority about Fanny Farmer is that I think her own personal experience gave her some insights into what to feed people when they’re sick or convalescing. And what struck me as being very fascinating is the idea of what you feed people who are recover recuperating is that doesn’t change over centuries and centuries. So it’s basically, you know, very soft, white, mushy food that was presumed to be easy to digest, something comparable to baby food, if you want to think of it that way. So, a lot of mush, a lot of milk, toast puddings, and things that we might not today think were, you know, necessarily so good for you or nutritious. Some concentrated broths, things like that, that were thought to be easy to digest. But she did a whole cookbook based on convalescent cookery. I think just after the turn of the century, it’s maybe nineteen oh-four or oh-five, somewhere in there. And we still don’t really, really know what foods are best for people who are convalescing. You know, we know they need vitamins. You know, they don’t need things that are very difficult to digest. But they had this idea that you couldn’t give sick people spices, or you couldn’t give them, you know, stimulants of any kind, so no coffee and things like that. And we don’t know that there’s no scientific basis really for that. You know, spices aren’t necessarily bad for you or hard to digest.

So, how does Professor Albala feel about exact measurements and cooking?

If you look at older cookbooks, quite often they won’t give you exact measurements. They’ll say, you know, “definitely a pinch of this.” And I think that’s actually perfectly fine way to cook. I cook that way, and I write cookbooks that way also. Some people find it infuriating, but I think, you know, if you’re going to really cook, you should learn what you like. You know, if you like a lot of salt in your food, then you will understand how much to add. You know, why should you, why should anyone trust my tastes? The thing that I’ve found amazing is, you know, they’ll the rest people say, “Bake this for fifteen minutes,” and someone looks in the oven, and it says—and they look at the dish; it’s clearly not cooked yet, and they take it out anyway, and they say, “Well, the recipe says fifteen minutes.” It’s like, “Well, no, trust these senses,” you know, “trust which you can learn through experimentation, and eventually you’ll find out what you like.” So I think an exact recipe, of which Fanny Farmer is not the inventor, but certainly contributed to our sense that cooking should be a science. I think what that does is comparable to what a GPS device does. You know, it gives you the directions. You come to depend on it. You never really learn where you are, you never really learn how to navigate, or, even if you didn’t know how to navigate. You come to trust the GPS device rather than your, your own instinct, and it unskills you. It really, I think, people who follow recipes also come to trust them so explicitly and think, “Oh, if I veer one inch from this, the whole dish is going to be ruined,” which ninety-nine percent of the time that’s not the case. Maybe if you’re doing cakes or very delicate pie crusts, you know, a little bit too much of anything might ruin it, but it’s still gonna be edible, it’s still gonna be fine. And I think for most recipes, you know, anything you cook, it’s not really gonna matter.

Fanny Farmer revolutionized the domestic cooking world, but Professor Albala leaves us with this cookbook caution.

So I think, in a sense, I would, I would almost blame Fanny Farmer for the use of, for the impression that exact recipes are the only way to cook, and the cookbook authors must give you an exact measurement, in an exact cooking time, a temperature in the oven or stovetop, and that, that sort of thing really isn’t under anyone’s control, and we have the impression that it is, and I think it’s made us deskilled. I think in the long run, she’s actually contributed to our, are not knowing how to cook so much because we depend on exact recipes, pseudo scientific recipes. And I can understand why modern cookbook offers follow in her steps. It’s because they want to copyright their exact wording and their measurements and all this stuff, and they want to give the impression to the reader that this is going to work. All you have to do is trust me and follow it, when what they’re doing is preventing the cooks from trusting themselves and trusting their own instinct and feeling the pan, feeling the spices and throwing them in and tasting it and seeing if he needs more. You know, that sort of thing is, I think, essential to cooking, and especially cooking. So you like what you make because, you know, it is not trusting someone else’s taste.

I’m so.

Smells so good.

Just have some cooking.

In nineteen oh-two, Fanny Farmer left the Boston Cooking School to open Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, aim not at professional cooks but at training housewives. Though she suffered another paralytic stroke later in life, she continued lecturing. In fact, ten days before her death in nineteen fifteen, she delivered a lecture from her wheelchair. A revised version of her book, now known as Fanny Farmer’s Cookbook, is still in print today, over one hundred years after its first printing. I’m Greg Hengler, and this is Our American Stories Weds. And thanks for.

That, as always, Greg. And by the way, my grandfather Leo taught me measurements, measurements. He was, “Here’s the tomatoes, learn how to taste it and make it different every night.” And you want to throw in the sausage and the meatball, throw it in there. You want to put some extra colic, go for it. And so it was always intuitive, but Fanny taught a lot of people how to cook, and especially housewives. Great story, Fanny Farmer’s story here on Our American Stories.

Cookaine, flavor the room. Coocaine.

It’s just a little flavor.

And a frill, room-filling on my soul.

Yeah, coocain, cookay, coocaine, cookain.