Fanny Farmer

 

Labor Day is coming and we think of simple folks who just worked hard. Fanny had a stroke at 16. It paralyzed her severely, she was wheelchair bound and had to relearn to talk.  What, she wondered, could she do with her life now? As she began to recover some ability to communicate, she gave much thought to how she could serve her family.   She would become the family cook!. Forget marrying into a leading Boston Brahmin clan or careers. Faith in God suddenly consumed her. She would just be a household servant.

            But as Fanny Merritt Farmer learned to cook, she was struck by how hard it was.  First, cookbooks relied on a lot of intuitive cooking experience.  They would list ingredients as “a hand full of flour,” or “pinch of salt” or “enough whiskey to taste.” Most cooks were women, considered emotional and none too scientific. Plus, no one explained how to serve the food.  Was one to just dump it altogether on a plate, or separate it?  And what was the manner of consumption—mopping up gravy with bread or what?  Fanny’s attempts at recipes were very much trial and error. But with good intuition, she managed to solve the mysteries.  She found there were Old English measures-- teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, that had precise meaning and she wrote copious notes.  Food had to be served so it was pleasing to the eye, taste and smell.  Eventually her health recovered until she could walk with a cane and she turned her parents’ house into a boarding house renowned for wonderful food. Mrs. Charles Shaw encouraged her to go to Boston Cooking School. And so at age 30, in 1889, she limped into classes and began.  Combining what she knew on her own, she learned nutrition, cooking for the ill, and household management.  First their top student, then assistant director, in 1891, she was hired as principal.

            The school already had a recipe book, but Fanny re-did the recipes including her measures.  She was very matter-of-fact in explanations, leaving nothing unexplained.  A cup of flour meant a level cup, sifted to ensure against variation in density. She wrote articles on housekeeping, drying fruits, pickling and canning.  1850 recipes were compiled.  And then using her father, an editor, as a guide, she published the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.  The publisher, Little & Brown, thought no one would buy it. It was too encyclopedic.  The 1896 printing was just a few copies which soon sold out. It took America by storm.  Demand for measuring cups and spoons became a growth industry. For the first time, exact recipes were to be found. The book was comprehensive, a definitive work on American cooking. People nicknamed the title “The Fanny Farmer Cookbook”. And it is still in publication today.

            Farmer eventually started her own cooking school but never forgot her mission to help those who were sick.  It eventually led her to develop a complete work of diet and nutrition for the ill, Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent, which contained thirty pages on diabetes.  She explained digestion and which foods were able to digest easily and rapidly.  She thought hard about presentation.  A plate must look beautiful and tempting for those who were not inclined to eat.  At length she investigated nutrition and how important it was to health.

            In 1906 she suffered another stroke. Amazingly, it did not stop her lectures to chefs, dieticians and Harvard Medical School.  Her lectures were picked up by the Boston Evening Transcript and printed regularly, even reprinted in the Tulsa World in that new state of Oklahoma. “The time is not far distant when knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one’s education. Then mankind will eat to live, be able to do better mental and physical work, and disease will be less frequent.” To food preparers worldwide she was the epitome of organized artistic cooking.  But as Fanny once said, “In Jesus Christ, no one’s life goes to waste.”

Anti-social behavior in Riots and looting

 

So you can’t reform a rioter, I heard at the Oklahoma Republican Committee Meeting. They had some new legislators introduce themselves and speak briefly.  Rep. Randy Randlewood of District 15 in eastern OK (been Dem represented for almost 100 years!) got up and said that he had checked this and discovered he was the first psychologist ever elected to the OK legislature.  Everyone laughed and cheered.  But I caught him after the talk and visited for awhile.  Illuminating.  His firm serves 115 public schools and the OK Corrections Dept. He began to talk about what was happening with Antifa.  The fact that they were indiscriminate in the damage they do, and to the people they beat to near death, worries psychologists--this is Antisocial Behavior.  That’s the way people behave when they have had so many abuses/traumas in their lives or have dug themselves into such a hole of crime that they are essentially beyond therapy.  Their hate is so complexly ingrained, they will slit a throat in the morning and then continue on the rest of the day as if nothing had happened.  Like the BTK killer of Wichita?  Randy agreed said that short of a true spiritual awakening, these folks are virtually unreformable and must be watched by authorities constantly.  When these folks are young they often torture and kill animals. And the indiscrimate attacks?  Normal people, committed to a cause think about how some behavior appears to others.  When someone tears down monuments to both Lincoln and a confederate general, or burns both black and white businesses, indiscriminate behavior, it shows they’re just tearing things down and burning—just showing hatred of everybody and everything, i.e. antisocial.  And if some group like the Democrats think they are going to take advantage of this anger, they will soon learn that such individuals will not stop looting and rioting when the Democrats call a hault. Only force dissuades and curbs them.

Kepler, perhaps the first true scientist

Johannes Kepler was walking in a Prague snowfall feeling badly about not having a New Year’s gift for his friend Mattias Wacker in 1610.  It got him to thinking about snowflakes, how each was unique and six-sided.  He began thinking about the mathematics of snow, always six-sided yet each flake unique. Made of frozen water, perhaps the frozen form must be arranging itself to minimize space, like a six-sided honeycomb.  His quick study turned out to be a pamphlet-book, On The Six-Sided Snowflake, which he sent to his friend as a gift, then published it in 1611. That paper is now considered the origin of cystallography.  “For a long time,” he later wrote, I wanted to become a theologian.  Now however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.”  Kepler had no doubt that God was a God of reason and order, a mathematician who left clues in nature for man to comprehend. 

            He was a German Lutheran boy and the Danish master astronomer, Tycho Brahe, had lent him a set of instruments. There was no word for ‘scientist’ in 1600.  He called himself  a “grubber for facts” from an expression about how farm chickens peck around grubbing for food.  On Feb. 19, 1604, Kepler was trying to measure the position of Mars and freezing, was disgusted with his results. Other astronomers like Copernicus felt that measurements within 10 minutes of a degree where just fine.  Kepler wanted a single minute.  Copernicus had merely speculated that the sun was the center of the solar system and that planets went around in circles on crystalline spheres.  Brahe had disproven the crystal spheres theory. Now what?  Kepler knew the answer was to postulate orbits, mere paths in space and what if there were forces around an object?  If you were trying to row a boat across a raging river, you’d curve your trajectory but a circular path is hardly expected.  He tried to fit a circular orbit to Mars but it didn’t work.  He tried an ellipse with the sun at a focus, from better data on a warmer night and found a perfect fit. In 1606 he published his book, New Star, explaining his measurements in exacting detail, including his wife’s acid critique and all the false turns and observations gone wrong.  These were expanded upon in 1609’s New Astronomy including 3 laws of planetary motion. Measurements were no longer approximations, but mathematical facts. The force in space was not a raging river, but, the world would find out the meaning of gravity.

            The reader must understand this era. Salem’s Witch Trials were 80 years into the future.  Everyone believed witches existed and magic too. Mathematicians like Galileo had a day job of teaching accounting. A new tool of medicine was bleeding the patient.  But Kepler was certain in his deep Christian faith that God had patterns in nature and he worked hard to decipher them.  When he discovered his 3 planetary laws, he experienced something of a spiritual epiphany, writing a prayer at the end of his thesis, “God, graciously cause these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and the salvation of souls.”  Kepler was not only the first mathematical scientific theorist, his findings  led to the surprising recognition that religious  motivation can sometimes make discoveries and it led to change the course of scientific history.

            In 1615, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew resulting in Katharina being accused of witchcraft. In August 1620, she was imprisoned for fourteen months. Katharina was subjected to territio verbalis, a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess.  Johannes came to her trial with stories of how she had raised him to love Jesus, so how could she collude with Satan? He put together a strong legal defense the way a scientist proves truth.  The court was flabbergasted. The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors. Katharina was released.  As the case became known, all of Germany began to debate, as Kepler had done, whether witches really were powerful or even existed. 

            Order, simplicity, beauty of nature, directed by a seemingly intelligent harmony—even secular scientists cannot get away from these assumptions today which are Christian to the hilt. The first theoretical science is often attributed to a premature-born, sickly  boy from a small town near Stuttgart who believed the gospel with all his heart.