Fannie Merritt Farmer

Fannie Merritt Farmer (1857–1915) was an American cookery teacher and the author of the most influential American cookbook of her time. A stroke in her teens ended her schooling, and she turned to cooking, enrolling at the Boston Cooking School in 1887 and becoming its principal in 1894. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896 at her own expense because her publisher doubted it would sell, introduced level measurements and exact instructions and sold millions of copies. In 1902 she opened her own school, Miss Farmer's School of Cookery, and she lectured on diet for the sick at Harvard Medical School, teaching from a wheelchair in her final years.