Often called the “mother of level measurements,” Fannie Farmer (1857-1915) is best known as the author of The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook. This was the first cookbook to use standardized measurements in recipes, assuring both novice and experienced cooks the same results.

Farmer was born in 1857 to parents who believed in education for women. At age 16, while attending Medford High School, she suffered a paralytic stroke, leaving her unable to walk. Taking up cooking and housekeeping to help support the family, she eventually turned her parents’ home into a boarding house known for its quality meals.

At age 30, having recovered her ability to walk, Farmer enrolled in the Boston Cooking School at the height of the domestic science movement. The school believed in a scientific approach to cooking and housekeeping, teaching nutrition and diet, sanitation, chemical analysis and household management, in addition to the techniques of cooking and baking. Excelling in her studies, she became the assistant to the director upon graduation and principal of the school two years later.

A force of nature and smart businesswoman, Farmer transformed the school, taking it from a struggling, philanthropic venture, to a popular cooking school for middle and upper-class housewives. Limping across her elevated kitchen platform, she would teach as many as two hundred students at a time. Interestingly, despite her ability to teach cooking, her niece, Wilma Lord, described her as more of, “a great executive food detective and gourmet, than a great cook herself,” with her maid doing much of the cooking.

In 1896, the Little Brown & Company published her pioneering book, The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, but limited the printing to 3,000 copies due to a poor sales prediction. Quite to the contrary, it was an immediate success, selling over 4 million copies during Farmer’s lifetime. Including tips on housekeeping and cleaning, food preservation, nutritional information, and, most importantly, a discussion of level measurement in relation to recipes, the publication single-handedly changed the way Americans cooked food.

In 1902, Farmer opened Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which was designed to train housewives, instead of teachers, institutional cooks or servants. She developed a program of diet and nutrition for convalescents. A popular lecturer, she was invited to speak to the medical students at Harvard Medical School. She wrote several additional cooking-related books before her death in 1915. Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery remained open until 1944.

A revised copy of her book, now entitled The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, is still in print today, over one hundred years since its first edition and is one of the highest selling cookbooks. Introducing science into the art of cooking, it became one of the most influential books in the world.