They basically assumed you had already watched the recipe being made, and just needed a reminder. (Chefs still communicate a lot like this with each other.) My favorite recipe direction ever, from Martha Washington's family cookbook, is "cook until it is enough".
Fanny Farmer invented the idea of rigorous measurements. And later, exact temperatures and times, when thermostats were invented. Scientific cooking is great for getting the results to come out every time and to communicate recipes to people who don't already basically know them. That took a lot of standardization and didn't come about until quite recently.
The only downside to her cookbooks is that she used volumetric measurements rather than weight. Volumetric measurements are fine for liquids, but very imprecise for ingredients that may be densely or loosely packed. Depending on how you scoop it, the density of flour may vary by as much as 50%. Measurement by mass avoids this issue entirely.
It seems a bit unfair to label it a downside to just her cookbooks. At least in the US, it's only been recently that recipe providers have transitioned to weight based recipes, with folks like Kenji championing the transition.
Agreed, but this was normal in professional pastry cookery. I guess I agree with both of you. The purpose of using exact measurements is to ensure exact reproduction of the product. Not using bakers percentages when you can, takes away from that goal. However, if this had been done, far fewer people would have used the recipes.
I’m glad recipes have moved past this but I still see code with these types of comments all the time. Maybe in another 100 years it’ll be unthinkable to write documentation this way? One can hope.
I reckon you're right, in some ways writing back then was more straightforward and direct. I'm guessing but perhaps that's because one had less exposure to the written word back then so writers were less corrupted by others' style.
I recall schooldays when I had to study some Chaucer, even this prose made sense once you got the gist of how to interpret it. (I'd add the caveat however: some words and phrases defied modern understanding without some form of translation, footnote explanations etc. Same applied to Shakespeare but to a lesser extent.)
Even today, hand-made paper (I bought some in one of a few old manual mills that are still in operation [0]) costs approximately one dollar per single A4.
Yeah it's expensive, but nevertheless it's lovely classy stuff.
(Electronic screens are fine in their place but atoms printed onto fine paper—preferably by the traditional letterpress method—is another higher experience altogether. Not only does the inky smell of freshly printed material add to the experience but so does the tactile feel of letterpress type indents.)
Indentation was seen as a defect when presses were in use. it's only these days when we want to show that a letterpress was used that we have indentations.
When I was a kid the education department printed a school magazine for us schoolkids and it was printed by letterpress and exhibited those characteristics. We kids used to often run our fingers down the pages to feel the impression of the type (sometimes we'd even shut our eyes and try to guess words from the feel of the impressions).
I would dispute your indentations comment for these reasons:
• Bad letterpress is quite ugly and uneven. This has always the case, problems are caused by many factors but mainly from cheap and overly absorbent paper stock which often leads to a considerable variation in print density and sometimes to excessive ink bleed.
• I knew two printers each from a different printing establishment who specialized in letterpress and they lectured me long and hard about controlling pressure to achieve the correct impression depth which is quite critical for excellent work. No impression or an overly shallow one (known as barely 'kissing' the paper) is unsatisfactory, likewise so are deep impressions caused by 'biting' the paper too hard (this also wears and damages the type). In practice, the optimal impression depth is often just past the 'kissing' point. (Incidentally, the reasons for us discussing letterpress in such technical detail came out of technical discussions about electronic image sharpening — see last point.)
• The reason why both the correct impression depth and the precise amount of inking is so important has to do with optical and visual characteristics of the printed type. A correctly inked type block causes the ink to 'pool' or thicken along edges, in corners and in type serifs. As the ink is denser in these edge areas it's fractionally darker than ink in the more open areas of the type. This leads to an optical sharpening effect along the edges of the type which makes letterpress visually very crisp—much more so than offset lithography (which is renowned for soft 'edges'). What happens here is somewhat akin to the way say Photoshop's 'unsharp' mask works.
Here's the more detailed explanation for diehards (sorry, bits of it may be heavy going). In well printed letterpress, the optical sharpening effect that comes into play is essentially mathematically equivalent to transient/step response in signal processing—as in electronic sharpening in video and television signals where overshoot and white-to-black/black-to-white transients are involved. Here, reducing the transition risetime (i.e.: the shorter the time it takes for a transition to go from white-to-black the sharper that transition looks). This is the basis of Sine Squared Pulse and Bar testing in television.
For the mathematically inclined, here's the Wiki on Step Response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_response The three graphs in Figure 4 give a reasonable facsimile of the differences between offset lithography and letterpress. The first graph is representative of the not very sharp smeared black to white transition in offset lithography whereas the fast risetime and overshoot in the last graph is representative of the much sharper letterpress. For completeness sake here's the BBC monograph on Pulse and Bar testing (this was once one of my textbooks on the subject): https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/bbc_monograph_58
There are millions of people who value writing, and writing tools. For example, if you ever make it to Japan, you'll see there are thousands of stores specializing in papers, pens, and other desk accessories that the SV bubble thinks are no longer useful.
My wife has a network of friends that she's met over the years from France to Hong Kong who all write to each other on actual paper. Either on antique typewriters (like my wife), or hand-written letters.
Recently I've learned that as more and more people are realizing that social media is a farce and are giving up on it, they're going back to the old ways of communicating that still work.
Because of that, you can't even buy a quality typewriter (not a Chinese replica) for under $500.
I found this strange effect while reading it. If I focused on each word, and tried to make sense of it, I could not grasp what was being instructed. However, if I read at normal speed, my brain seemed to pattern match the words and convert them to the modern usage and I could make sense of it.
Agreed. A trained or experienced cook would have no issues with these instructions. When you learn cooking as a trade you learn basic techniques so actual recipes are terse and deal in basic components, techniques to combine or prepare them, and maybe some special instructions that go beyond this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Cooking-School_Cook...
They basically assumed you had already watched the recipe being made, and just needed a reminder. (Chefs still communicate a lot like this with each other.) My favorite recipe direction ever, from Martha Washington's family cookbook, is "cook until it is enough".
Fanny Farmer invented the idea of rigorous measurements. And later, exact temperatures and times, when thermostats were invented. Scientific cooking is great for getting the results to come out every time and to communicate recipes to people who don't already basically know them. That took a lot of standardization and didn't come about until quite recently.