Many of us grew up with a well-worn cookbook close at hand in the kitchen. In my case, it was my mom's Betty Crocker Cookbook, full of 1960s quick-and-easy family-favorite recipes with lots of highly processed ingredients. And long ago when my husband and I were budding young counter-culturistas, wanting different foods than what our mothers served up, our go-to was The Moosewood Cookbook.

What was yours? Did your mom chuckle over the chummy confidences tucked among the 900-plus pages of her Joy of Cooking tome, or did your she stick with grandma's favorite, which very well might have been The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, later republished as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook?

Fannie Farmer 1857-1915 The Mother of Level Measurements

Fannie Farmer reached wide and deep into American cooking culture. She was a century ahead of the Cooking Channel, but just about every millennial foodie can trace their culinary backgrounding to her influence.

Fannie Farmer had to self-publish the first edition of her cookbook because the publishing establishment didn't think it would sell. She sold advertising space in the back of the book to help foot the bill. Today, Fannie Farmer's Cookbook is still in print, and more than 3 million copies have sold. What made her cookbook so important that it is still being published today?

At the turn of the last century, she pulled an entire culinary tradition out of a complex jumble of industrial food processing and upheaval over immigration (sound familiar?) into an ordered universe of precise cookery. According to The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, if you measured things properly and followed instructions, things would turn out good. Or, at least your meal would. Where have you gone, Fannie Farmer?

Advertisement from the back pages of my friend's grandmother's Boston Cooking School Cookbook (pictured above). 

https://briahistorica.com/2017/04/05/the-gilded-age-woman-who-put-the-original-joy-in-american-cooking/

Overlooked No More: Fannie Farmer, Modern Cookery's Pioneer