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Fannie Merritt Farmer (1857-1915) was the most important American cookery writer of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), called The Fannie Farmer Cookbook in its dozens of posthumous revised editions, was the basic text of the American kitchen before the Joy of Cooking took over from it.

Fannie Farmer was born in Boston. Partially paralysed by a stroke in her youth, she could not go on into higher education, but she learned to cook, at the Boston Cooking School. She graduated from there, aged 32, in 1889, and promptly took it over and ran it from 1891 to 1902. She then opened Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston, which trained housewives rather than cookery instructors.