Fannie Farmer, Mickey Mouse, and the Virtues of Cheating

Fannie Farmer’s 1896 cookbook changed the way home cooks went about their home cooking. She didn’t invent measurements, nor was she the first to include measurements with her recipes. But she changed everything.

I have a reprint of The Original White House Cookbook 1887 Edition and an estate sale-find copy of what I’m pretty sure is a first edition – mainly because it’s old and beaten up but I also have a hard time imagining demand for a second – of Arts Revealed and Universal Guide; Containing Many Rare and Invaluable Recipes and Directions for The Use of Families; From The Best Authorities, dated 1854. Both have measurements in the text.

Arts Revealed has a bit of everything – recipes for hair tonic, clothing dyes, cure for freckles (lemon-juice, borax, and sugar) – so it’s not a cookbook per se, but it ends with a chapter on cakes. There are measured quantities listed with few to no instructions, so you get “Plain Cake.—Mix two cups of sour cream or milk, with one cup of sugar and some salæratus; then stir in five cups of wheat flour.” Seems straightforward. Oven dials didn’t exist and there doesn’t seem much point in saying “pre-heat to nine briquettes of charcoal or the metric equivalent.” The 1887 book presents in a similar way but muddies the water with occasional adjectives preceding measurements; “even cup of,” making you wonder about the unmodified cup from the previous recipe. There’s also some “add enough _______ to” achieve thickening, coloring, or whatever effect desired. These were functional cookbooks though they relied on the reader having a sense of how to proceed in the kitchen.

Farmer’s innovation was to stress precision. Most of her recipes are presented in the familiar cookbook layout you find in genre classics like Joy of Cooking. She gives a bold faced dish title, a list of ingredients with quantities, followed by a paragraph or two filled with “mix” and “add” synonyms. There’s nothing groundbreaking in how the individual recipes were presented. It was an adherence to the recipe that she preached.

On page 27 under the heading “How to Measure,” she writes,

“Correct Measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results. Good judgement, with experience, has taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides.”

No more scooping a cup of flour. She insisted it be sifted and leveled with a knife. Fats must be packed into the determining vessel. Liquids go to the brim. Exactness was the key to reproducibility, and she aimed to reproduce.

When I was a kid, it was gospel among playground collectors of surprising but surely true oddities adults got up to that professional chefs spit in their soup as a finishing ritual. I hope that that was never true, even in France. Putting something of yourself into your culinary creations is a nice thought if not taken literally.

Cooks have a personal touch. You can be a good cook. You can be a bad cook. There’s je ne sais quoi involved. Farmer didn’t take that away – you can still put elan in your flan – but it’s hard to be a bad measurer. She didn’t automate cooking, but she brought it closer to a fixed process. By insisting on a standard, she conjured a wrong way. Suddenly people weren’t doing it right. The tasting spoon didn’t get banished, but Farmer got us to set it a little towards the left to make more room for household beakers.

I’ve never seen Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. I got an earful of that little whiner Caillou and called a lid on watching children’s programming for our rearing duration. My wife is more tolerant of nonsense like that and endured more than her share of what our kids watched before Dragon Ball Z. I mentioned something I read about the Mickey Mouse Show to her and she responded with imprecisely measured invective. It sounds pretty terrible to hear her tell it.

The reason I brought it up, was because of something Matthew B. Crawford wrote about in The World Beyond Your Hand. I’m only halfway through so far but I’ll already declare it damned interesting if you’re looking for something to read. He explained that in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, when cornered or presented with a problem in need of solving, the characters in the show yell out “Oh, Toodles!” and a supercomputer appears to save the day. It gives them Mouseketools to solve the problem. Kinda.

My kids migrated towards anime because it’s violent and there are defined bad guys who aren’t victims of a poor upbringing. Anime also lets you enjoy escapism without trying to teach you saccharine or dubious lessons like American shows do. So, what exactly is a kid supposed to learn from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse?

Not problem solving. Instead of innovation or self-reliance, “Oh, Toodles!” doesn’t teach anyone how to do anything other than call for assistance, to ease into their role as helicoptered. Crawford equates it to a magic incantation whisking troubles away. Even the Mouseketools are set options in lieu of creativity. “I’m stuck in a pit. I wish I had a ladder!” they might cry. And then a ladder appears. Not exactly MacGuyver.

I love Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I think I’d want to strangle her in real life, but she’s great tucked away in fiction. There’s a scene in the book Wyrd Sisters where Granny and a few other witches are evaluating prospective recruits to their witching ways. It’s been ages since I’ve read the book and our copy is wherever someone put it last, so my recollection is as distilled through a couple of decades, but one of the established witches stands wearing a hat before the assembled and Granny instructs the prospects to knock it off her head.

They attempt all manner of cantrips and furrow their brows in effort, but none of them has the skill to budge the hat. When they’ve failed at all the spells they know to try, Granny walks up to the sister and flips the hat off with her hand. “That’s not magic!” they cry.

“I didn’t say anything about using magic,” says Granny. I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist. “Being a witch is knowing the best way to get something done. Sometimes it’s magic, but not always.”

Another thing Crawford writes about in The World Beyond Your Hand is jigs. In carpentry, if you have to make the same complicated cut fitty-leven times, instead of measuring and marking each time, you make a guide called a jig. Lay it on top or alongside the plank you want cut, and reproduce your original with ease. He applies the jig concept by metaphor to include simple tasks we once labored over but no longer do. Our mind has mapped a path that we follow as often as we like without thinking. He offers shoelace tying as an example.

Watch a kid learning to tie his shoes. He gets the individual steps. He can make a loop and cross laces and he understands that when he’s done all that, he needs to pull tight to make a knot. He can’t do any of those things in concert; tongue sticking out between his lips and mind searching blank spaces where unlearned curses should be.

Then he gets it. Boom. No more concentrating on what he’s doing or worrying that one side will be too long. Once he has it, the process is set in his mind. I don’t tie my shoes and, I suspect, neither do you. We engage shoe tying protocols and think about squirrels while our body goes through familiar motions.

That’s not quite automation, but it’s close in the sense that we decide what we want and rather than thinking about the steps, select a package of action performed seemingly without us. Almost autonomically.

We aren’t what we do, but I fear we have it in us to let what we are slip away. That’s not going to happen because of measuring cups, but we’re following a jig when we make a cake recipe. Muscle memory is a goal. We don’t want to think about every step of tying a shoelace any more than we want to sound out every letter when we read. It’s important to know that running on automatic, acting without thought is something we are capable of.

It may be as Douglas Murray recently wrote, that as you get old you risk falling for an illusion of incompetence in those younger than you. You accumulate experience and, ideally, wisdom as the percentage of the living in possession of less experience and, probably, wisdom grows while the older and wiser dwindle. The world looks stupider from your perspective. Kids these days.

True or not, it’s current wisdom that millennials or Gen Z aren’t much for problem solving. Everybody above a certain age has a story. I told a young busser to mop up some soup that was spilled in a little used back hallway of a restaurant. After shift, when she’d left, I opened the door to the hall and there was still soup on the floor. When I asked her about it the next day, she told me she couldn’t find a mop and said it in such a way that she assumed I’d understand the missing mop released her from responsibility. She didn’t ask anybody where it was. She didn’t use towels instead. She was an otherwise clever girl, but she seemed to think my goal was to have her mop rather than to have her clean up the soup.

Video games are full of puzzles to solve. Even sports games require figuring out how to do something if it’s as simple as recognizing a defense and calling an audible to counter. The problem is you can’t cheat. Every problem in a video game is solvable exclusively within the rules. If the programmer didn’t think of it, it doesn’t work.

We want kids to learn to think outside the box, but these games are severely limiting. We learn by play early in life, no different than other animals in that regard. Nowadays, such a huge amount of play time is spent moving along set paths on screens. The game doles out Mouseketools and you can’t think outside the screen.

There are exceptions. I read about someone building a working computer inside the game Minecraft. That’s hard to wrap my head around and I salute whoever pulled that off. But in most games, you follow a set path doing allowed things. If the Gordian Knot were in a video game, you’d have to unravel the whole damn thing.

This isn’t recent generations’ fault. We’re not letting kids cheat. Pick up games seem to have disappeared. You learn a lot about bluffing, your own talents, and the bounds of diplomacy by getting punched in the nose for arguing that a clear ball was in the strike zone. Organized fun has taken over, and that comes with parents. “Oh, Toodles!” and both sides defer to an omnipresent adult. They are boxed in with an acceptable choice of solutions.

AI is promising a world where you don’t have to unlock doors or write your own emails. Opportunity to slough off attention are going increase absurdly. We don’t want to be bothered by stuff, so we’ll let it do all manner of tasks for us. It’s worrisome to see that when limited options are given, we accept limited options. AI is going to change how we view our actions and challenge our perception of art and creativity. If our treasured accomplishments are reproduced, reduced to a bit of this and a dash of that, the temptation is to see ourselves and our actions as concoctions, ideas as chemistry experiments. We need to raise cheaters.

Young people need to know that one day in the future, Captain Kirk will receive a commendation for reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru scenario. They need to know about Granny Weatherwax. I’m terrified of a future where duct tape is restricted to mending ducts.

I have eight Jamie Oliver cookbooks. I love them. I started watching his show The Naked Chef back when it first started airing in the U.S. I’m not sure when that was exactly, but around 2000. He’s taken on this ambassadorial personality now and can be a bit much trying to guitar-youth-minister sustainability and organic practices. My wife calls him Food Jesus.

Still, his shows are very good and he seems like a nice guy. The books – also very good – are well put together, considerate of the home cook, and full of simple recipes. I’ve enjoyed the vast majority I’ve tried. He’s got ingredient measurements listed, but I’ve seen the show. He doesn’t give a fuck about meticulously portioning out anything. You can ignore his amounts more than you’d typically ignore anything listed in metric.

Oliver’s fantastic at pairing flavors and trusts experience and his taste buds. Rip off some basil, sprinkle salt, pour a few glugs of wine, taste, correct. It’s much more fun to be bold than to safely follow a recipe.

That said, I bet he likes Fannie. I do.