The Original Boston Cooking School Cook Book 1896, by Fannie M. Farmer (facsimile) New York City, 1973
A New Book of Cookery, by Fannie M. Farmer, Boston, 1917

Sometimes described as the “Mother of Level Measurements,” Fannie Farmer lives on through her still-popular cookbook. As the principal of the Boston Cooking School for nearly ten years and the founder of her own cooking school, she was the best known cooking teacher of her time. Unlike many of her colleagues, she never claimed to be an advanced scientist or a moral guide. She liked

to think of herself as a businesswoman with a product—scientific cookery—which she made accessible, attractive and even essential to many middle class housewives. The sense of control engendered by her insistence on the exactness of level measurements (not a rounded teaspoon, not a heaping tablespoon, not butter the size of a hen’s egg) along with the greatly simplified introduction to food chemistry made up a version of scientific cookery that housewives found very easy to adopt.