This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

And we continue with our American stories.

This is the story about Fannie Farmer, the mother of level measurements. Take it away,

Greg Angling. Cooking in the late 1800s was unpredictable, tiresome and difficult. Recipes were

passed down in families, but often contained vague, if any, actual measurements. If the ingredients were named, home cooks might have been directed to add a pinch or a dash,

or to make a pie crust.

On January 7, 1896, a young woman from Boston changed everything when she published her first cookbook.

Cooking. Gonna make her some food. changed everything when she published her first cookbook.

Benny Merritt Farmerit Farmerer's self-published tome, the 1896 Boston Cooking School cookbook, was 600 pages and contained almost 1,500 recipes and sold for $2. I asked Ken Albaella, professor of history

and food studies at University of Pacific in California,

if what history says about Fannie Farmer is accurate.

Fannie Farmer is usually credited with having introduced measurements to cooking and a list of ingredients

and basically the modern recipe format. That's not quite true.

There were measurements before, and in fact, some authors use precise measurements five centuries

before. What she does introduce is the level measuring cups. So if you take a cup of flour

or sugar or something, she says to use the flat end of a knife and scrape it off to get a level measure.

And the assumption was that cooking is not an art.

It's a science.

And that if you get your measurements exact, you're going to have the same results every time, which of course is not true because ovens are erratic and ingredients change depending on

the weather. Flower especially, really, most of the world measures it by weight for some reason in the

U.S. and my instinct says, and I can't really prove this, but is that we had people selling measuring

...