Fannie Merritt Farmer

Fannie Merritt Farmer (23 March 1857 – 16 January 1915) was an American culinary expert whose Boston Cooking-School Cook Book became a widely used culinary text.

Education

Fannie Farmer was born on 23 March 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, to Mary Watson Merritt Farmer and John Franklin Farmer, an editor and printer. The family was Unitarian. The oldest of four daughters in a family that highly valued education, she was expected to go to college, but suffered a paralytic stroke at the age of 16 while attending Medford High School.

For the next several years she was unable to walk and remained in her parents' care at home. During this time Farmer took up cooking, eventually developing a reputation for the quality of the meals her mother's boarding house served.

Farmer developed a substantial limp that never left her. At the age of 30 she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School at the suggestion of Mrs. Charles Shaw. Farmer studied there during the height of the domestic science movement, learning its most critical elements, including nutrition and diet for the well, convalescent cookery, techniques of cleaning and sanitation, chemical analysis of food, techniques of cooking and baking, and household management. Farmer was considered one of the school's top students, graduating in 1889 and staying on as assistant to the director. In 1891, she took the position of school principal.

Cookbook fame

Fannie published her best-known work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, in 1896. A follow-up to an earlier version called Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book, published by Mary J. Lincoln in 1884, the book under Farmer's direction eventually contained 1,850 recipes, from milk toast to Zigaras à la Russe. Farmer also included essays on housekeeping, cleaning, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, and nutritional information.