The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
Originally, cookbooks didn’t give precise measurements for recipes - they just told readers to use a “pinch” of this, a “heaping spoonful” of that, and a “handful” of something else. Fannie Merrit Farmer, a domestic servant in the late 1850’s, had no trouble following such recipes herself - but she found it almost impossible to give instructions to the young girl who helped her in the home where she worked. So she began rewriting the family’s recipes using more precise measurements.
Forty years later, she had become the assistant principal of the prestigious Boston Cooking School. In 1896 she decided to publish her first book of “scientific” recipes, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Her publisher was so worried it wouldn’t sell that he forced Farmer to pay for printing costs herself. She did. It sold four million copies and permanently changed the way cookbooks are written.
