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Take it away, Greg Hanger. Cooking in the late 1800s 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 7th, 1896, a young woman from Boston changed everything when she published her first cookbook. Fannie Merritt Farmer's self-published home, the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook, was 600 pages and contained almost 1,500 recipes and sold for $2. I asked Ken Albala, professor of history and food studies at University of Pacific in California, if what history says about Fannie Farmer is accurate. Fannie 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 used precise measurements five centuries before. What she does introduce is the level measuring cup. 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 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 it caught on in the U.S., is that we assumed 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 that's just a pretense and it matters in baking, perhaps, but certainly no other type of cooking does it really matter how much you throw in of everything. So her reputation in that respect is a little skewed, I would say. I think what is fascinating about her is, of course, she was a business woman, and she 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 caught on. The publishers didn't think it would. In fact, they made her pay for the first print run, which is sort of not a nice thing to do for an author.
It says, we don't really trust you, but maybe if you make the money, 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 from that, not the publisher. Fannie Farmer's cookbook sold over 4 million copies during her lifetime. Fannie planned on going to college, but a stroke at the age of 16 left her paralyzed and forced her to stay at home. Eventually, she would walk again, though she would always maintain a limp.
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 feed sick people. And of course, the idea, I've actually, this is something I've actually written about, the only thing I can speak of, you know, with direct authority about Fannie 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 recovering, recuperating, is that doesn't change over centuries and centuries. 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 broth, 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 1904 or 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 in 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 or that. And I think that's actually a 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 taste? The thing that's amazing is, you know, the recipe will say, bake this for 15 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 15 minutes. It's like, well, no, trust the senses. You know, trust what, what you can learn through experimentation, and eventually you'll find out what you like.
So I think an exact recipe of which Fannie 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 you, even if you did know how to navigate, you come to trust the GPS device rather than 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 99% of the time, that's not the case. Maybe if you're doing cake or very delicate pie crust, you know, a little, a little bit too much of anything might ruin it, but, but it's still going to be edible, it's still going to be fine. And I think for most recipes, you know, anything you cook, it's not really going to matter. Fannie Farmer revolutionized the domestic cooking world, but Professor Albala leaves us with this cookbook caution. So I think in a, in a sense, I would, I would almost blame Fannie 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, an exact cooking time, a temperature in the oven or stove top. 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 de-skilled. I think in the long run, she's actually contributed to our, our not knowing how to cook so much because we depend on exact recipes, pseudo-scientific recipes. And I can understand why modern cookbook authors follow in her footsteps. 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 cook 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 it needs more, you know, that sort of thing is I think essential to cooking and especially cooking so you like what you make, you know, is not trusting someone else's taste. In 1902, Fannie Farmer left the Boston Cooking School to open Miss Farmer's School of Cookery, aimed not at professional cooks, but at training housewives. Though she suffered another paralytic stroke later in life, she continued lecturing.
In fact, 10 days before her death in 1915, she delivered a lecture from her wheelchair. A revised version of her book now known as Fannie Farmer's Cookbook is still in print today, over 100 years after its first printing. I'm Greg Hengler, and this is our American Stories. And thanks for that, as always, Greg.
And by the way, my grandfather Leo taught me measurements, schmeasurements. 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 in some extra colic? Go for it. And so it was always intuitive. But Fannie taught a lot of people how to cook and especially housewives. Great story.
Fannie Farmer's story, here on Our American Story. Yeah. Tired of boring lunches? Picture this. You're at Chipotle ordering the same old burrito bowl.
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