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Recipe for Success

© Megan Drummond

Fannie Merritt Farmer. Hers is not a name that would be written down if you were asked to compile a list of great women authors. Fannie Farmer did not pen any great works of fiction or write any timeless poems. But she did write something more complex than any work of fiction or any poem. Miss Farmer wrote what is still considered today to be one of America’s great treasures. She wrote The 1896 Boston Cooking School Cookbook.

Fannie Farmer suffered a stroke during her high school years, leaving her partially paralyzed and forcing her to give up her dream of going to college. After her recovery, the girl began work as a “mother’s helper.” It was while doing this work that Fannie discovered her interest in and talent for cooking.

As with most cookbooks of the time, Fannie’s cookbook was simply a revised and updated version of an earlier book. Mary J. Lincoln, a teacher at the Boston Cooking School, had published the book from which Fannie was working. With her parent’s support, Fannie became a student at the school and began following Lincoln’s cookbook. The Original Boston Cooking School Cook Book was used primarily in training professional chefs. But women who wanted to treat their homemaking as a domestic profession – more seriously and scientifically - also found it useful.

Fannie graduated from the Boston Cooking School in 1889 and remained there as an assistant director. She became the school’s director in 1894 and two years later, revised and reissued Lincoln’s cookbook with her own style. Until Farmer’s book was published, ingredient lists in cookbooks had been haphazardly put together, always leaving the cook to guess at how much of a given ingredient to add. Farmer listed standardized measurements for each ingredient, thereby changing the face of cooking and adding a sense of consistency to each meal.

Fannie left the Boston school in 1902 to open her own school. Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery was aimed at training housewives in the art of cooking, not professional chefs. In addition to writing several more cooking-related books, Fannie was also a frequent lecturer on domestic topics.

Fannie Farmer never married and had no children, but lived a full and happy life. She died in 1915 in Boston, at the age of 58. Her School of Cookery remained open until 1944 and her cookbooks remain, more than one hundred years later, among the most important books in American history.

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