Every family has a family recipe – whether it be Aunt Linda’s lemon tart recipe, or the instructions for making great grandma Carolynn’s chicken pot pie.

If you’re lucky, you have a legible copy of the recipe, with the ingredients clearly marked, and their portions easy to read. Each time you pull the recipe out to recreate the family favorite, it’s like sitting down to dinner with great grandma Carolynn all over again.

But for the rest of us, that’s not how it usually goes.

Instead, we usually have a grungy scrap of paper – crusted with bits of unidentifiable food – that looks like it could be part of the Dead Sea Scroll, and it certainly smells like it could.

This recipe is invariably written in a hand that suggests great grandma had had just enough time to jot down the recipe before the paramedics took her away, and would indeed make any doctor proud.

But don’t sweat it; it doesn’t really matter if you can read the chicken scratch, because from the looks of it, great grandma never heard of teaspoons, tablespoons or cups. Instead, her dish apparently requires several pinches of this, a goodly amount of that, and a handful of something else.

In life, your great grandma was 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds sopping wet. You, on the other hand, are 6 foot, easily pushing 200 (it’s the holidays, so 210) and have hands the size of a dinner ham. Your pinches and handfuls sure aren’t the same has hers, and you have no clue how much a “goodly amount” really is.

You love your great grandma, sure. But by now, you’re probably shooting dirty looks towards that picture of her that hangs in the hallway, and you’re beginning to think the old goat had no intention of anyone else cooking her dish, even if they were family.

Before you throw in the towel – and say some things you’ll later regret – understand that your great grandma might not have meant to be so obtuse after all. Depending on when the recipe was written, she might have simply been passing down the recipe as she herself had been taught it.

Before the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, home cooking was an imprecise art form. It relied on the oral transmission of knowledge, from one generation of women to the next. Those women who lacked such an important mother figure in their lives loss out on this teaching, and their cooking usually suffered.

All of that changed in the 1890s when home economics teacher and revolutionary chef, Fannie Farmer, published her cookbook – the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.

In it, Fannie presented to the world, for the first time ever, the modern recipe. No more “pinches and “handfuls” in the kitchen, thank you very much. Instead, as she wrote in her book, “Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to ensure the best results.”

Although she didn’t invent the teaspoon and tablespoon, she was the one responsible for popularizing the use of such precise measuring devices for cooking. She was, by all accounts, the 19th century’s version of Julia Child. In fact, Ms. Child recalled using Fannie’s cookbook as a young girl, whipping up pancakes, popovers and fudge.

When she published the cookbook, Fannie Farmer was working as a teacher at the Boston Cooking School – a school that was created to enable women of modest means to find work as cooks in private homes and institutions.

Although Farmer herself didn’t come from modest means – she hailed from a genteel family in nearby Medford – she did understand the power cooking had to elevate the status of women in society.

When she was just 16 years old, Farmer suffered partial paralysis in her legs, likely due to polio. Before this, she had intended to attend university and become a schoolteacher, but her handicap effectively ended those dreams. Looking at a long, unremarkable life as an old spinster bereft of useful employment, Farmer was distraught.

All of this changed when her father finally allowed her to leave the house to go work as a governess for a family friend. While there, her new employers encouraged her to take up cooking – a pursuit in which Farmer had already shown some promise.

Over the next several years, the young woman spent as much time in the kitchen as possible. She had finally found something worth pursuing; something she could see herself doing for the rest of her life, despite her handicap. At the age of 31, she left work as a governess and enrolled in the Boston Cooking School.

Immediately upon graduation in 1889, she returned to the school as staff. It was during her years as a teacher there that she developed the technique of precise cooking that would lead to the publication of her internationally famous cookbook.

Like the great celebrity chefs of the 20th and 21st century, Fannie Farmer took advantage of the success of her cookbook, and began touring the nation as a lecturer. In 1902, she opened her own cooking school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which became so profitable that she was able to buy land, build a large house and support her elderly parents.

It came as a shock to all when Miss Farmer died of a stroke on Jan. 15, 1915. She was only 57 years old. Although her life was cut short, her legacy lived on – and continues to live on to this day. To date, more than seven million copies of her cookbook have been sold.

Which begs the question – what was great grandma thinking when she wrote down that recipe?

Then again, we can’t all be Julia Childs – or Fannie Farmers.

Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.