A Brief History of Scientific Eating

a reflection, a prayer, and a recipe to start your week

When you think of a recipe, I assume the first thing that comes to mind is a list of measurements: 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon sugar, ½ teaspoon baking soda. It’s about as hard to imagine recipes without these measurements as it is to imagine food apart from calories and macronutrients like protein, fat, and carbs.

I received most of my culinary training while working at Sofra Bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the time of my hiring, my chef, Maura Kilpatrick, was working on her first cookbook—Soframiz—translating recipes from Turkey and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean into American contexts. She noted one day how few of the recipes she studied had any kind of standardized measurements. Instead, they provided ingredients in terms of teacups and other servingware a family might have in their home kitchen. The recipes were intended to be passed down from generation to generation along with the family dishes, so descriptions in terms of these resources made sense. However they made following the recipes complicated for anyone outside the fold. Nevertheless, this method of writing recipes—with the assumption that they would be accompanied by in-person lessons and relationships—is common among most recipes written prior to the 20th century.

Standard measuring cups and spoons were not popularized in America until 1896 with the release of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. The book was written by Boston Cooking School teacher Fannie Farmer, who is fondly known as the mother of level measurements.

Rather than train pupils for a career in professional kitchens, as most cooking schools before this time had done, the Boston Cooking School was dedicated to training home cooks and housewives in the skills of home management. In addition to lessons in cooking, students learned about nutrition and domestic science.

Boston Cooking School took an intellectual approach to the kitchen, offering women an opportunity to perceive their work in the home as parallel to the male spheres of research, technology, and business. The school was unconcerned with teaching its pupils to make food that tasted good, but instead to make food that was nutritionally and economically optimized: the most nutrients for the least amount of money.

In this manner, writes historian Laura Shapiro, the school “worked to establish a cuisine that would be nobler, somehow, than the act of eating.”¹