Grandma's recipe card says a pinch of salt and nothing else

Butter the size of an egg. A handful of flour. Her hands were half the size of mine. — New bride, 1889

The oldest recipes anybody's found are on Babylonian clay, and they hardly ever say how much of anything to use. About 3,600 years later, Fannie Farmer, who ran a cooking school in Boston, wrote a cookbook with level, exact measurements. Her publisher didn't think it would sell, so she paid to print the first 3,000 copies herself and kept the rights. It sold millions. Her publisher went by feel.

Still bugs us: King Arthur Baking says a cup of flour weighs 4 1/4 ounces. America's Test Kitchen says five.

The full file

Fannie Farmer had a hard start. As a teenager she had a paralyzing illness, a stroke, some say, maybe polio, that ended her schooling and left her with a limp. She didn't start at the Boston Cooking School until she was 28. She graduated in 1889 and ended up running the place.

Her book put it plainly: "Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results." People still call her the mother of level measurements.

She went on to cooking for the sick. She taught a course on it at Harvard, lectured at Harvard Medical School, and wrote Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent in 1904, which she thought was her best work. After more strokes she couldn't walk, so she taught from a wheelchair. She gave her last lecture about ten days before she died in 1915. A pinch of anything was never good enough for her.