aem wrote:
> Here's a quote from the historian Mark Kurlansky:
>
> "Fannie Merritt Farmer, an enormously influential cookbook writer,
> believed in extremely precise instructions and popularized the idea of
> exact measurements for recipes
She was the
> most famous director of the Boston Cooking School, founded a
> generation earlier to teach working-class women how to cook
> "scientifically."

Hate to argue with an historian, but I have a copy of the original Fanny
Farmer cookbook (obviously a reprint). The book states the school was to
teach women IMMIGRANTS to cook using ingredients which were not necessarily
native to their homeland. In that case, I would think the students would
need measurements in order to know how to prepare recipes using foodstuffs
foreign to them.

> Now we know what the purpose of rfc is: to combat this evil legacy
> from Fannie Farmer. We are the anti-Fannies. Except for baking.
> -aem

Having said that, I rarely measure anything. A newbie cook would probably
need to. As you grow more comfortable, eyeballing measurements, what types
of types of herbs or spices to use with what, etc., just becomes second
nature. It probably did to those students, too, once the acclaimated
themselves to the brave new world

Jill