Cunningham, Marion

In the mid-1970s Fanny Farmer Candy Shops, Inc., holder of the rights to the work originally titled The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896) by Fannie Merritt Farmer, approached several publishers to inquire about publishing a thoroughly updated revision. On the advice of James Beard, the eminent editor Judith Jones suggested assigning the bulk of the task to the California-based Marion Cunningham (1922–), a student of Beard’s and teaching assistant at his summer cooking classes in Gearhart, Oregon. The result, principally completed by Cunningham and Jeri Laber, appeared in 1979 as The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. It promptly achieved popularity comparable to that of the original, of which it was officially the twelfth edition. It also established the fifty-six-year-old Cunningham as the public face of the book—“Today’s Fannie Farmer,” as her publisher sometimes billed her. Her standing among the first rank of American culinary authorities was confirmed by later works including The Breakfast Book (1987), the thirteenth Fannie Farmer edition (1990), The Supper Book (1992), Cooking with Children (1995), Learning to Cook with Marion Cunningham (1999), and Lost Recipes (2003). For many years she was also a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.