“The most amazing thing about Fannie Farmer is most people don't even know who she is,” food historian Susan Benjamin said, “and yet they're affected by what she did every single day.”
Benjamin owns True Treats, a history-based candy shop in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. She's been researching Farmer's enduring impact and explained how before “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” recipes suggested a dash of this or a tea cup of that. But Farmer changed the game by introducing the concept of standardized leveled measurements.
“It sounds really simple and really obvious, but it isn't,” Benjamin said, “which was that you would have a certain measurement for an ingredient — say flour — and you put it in a very specific kind of cup, took a knife, and you leveled it. So you had a very precise and quantifiable amount of flour in your cup.”
Farmer put it this way in her tome:
"Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results. Good judgement, with experience, has taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides."
Benjamin credits Farmer for influencing her contemporaries, as well as generations of cooks to come.
“Anyone who goes to their kitchen, takes out a measuring cup, takes out a teaspoon, follows the directions on how to use it, is doing what Fannie Farmer advocated,” she said. “And that's amazing. She's the one who created this and brought it to the world.”
But when Farmer first set out to make measuring and other fundamentals of domestic science available to more women, her publisher was skeptical. “She provided the upfront costs,” Benjamin recounted, “and she also, in the process, retained the copyright.” The book became a hit. “It was worth a fortune, and of course she became a very wealthy woman because of it,” she said.
Benjamin calls Farmer's compendium “renegade” because it applied math and science to tasks everyday women saw as drudgery. “Cooking was boring, cleaning was boring,” she explained.
Anyone who goes to their kitchen, takes out a measuring cup, takes out a teaspoon, follows the directions on how to use it, is doing what Fannie Farmer advocated.
Along with hundreds of detailed recipes, Farmer included chemical compositions of food, tables for cooking temperatures and times, photos of useful tools, tips for reducing waste and all manner of nutrition-related data.
Farmer didn't make success in the kitchen easy, Benjamin said, but she made it possible — and way more interesting — which was part of the mission of domestic science movement.