[nanolith]

Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as crude protein and carbohydrate measurements and grind sizes in flour. I provided standardized weights and measurements, in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.

She's upset that the recipes are different, but when it comes to recipes from the thirties and later based on using a box of this or a can of that, these recipes are resistant to shrinkflation. The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.

Some recipes, like cakes and cookies, will need to be adjusted once a generation. For these recipes, I include notes about how to tell when certain ingredients are "off" so that these can be re-calibrated as ingredients change in the future. Ingredients change. Some are no longer available. Others are derived from newer varieties or hybrids that have different flavor profiles. For instance, bananas taste differently than they did sixty years ago. That old and dusty banana pudding recipe meant to reproduce that amazing pudding that your great-grandmother used to make won't taste the same unless you adjust the amount of isoamyl acetate; modern varieties have less of this compound than the old Gros Michel varieties did. You can occasionally find Gros Michel bananas if you want to taste the difference, but they are no longer a viable cash crop due to their susceptibility to Panama disease.

[dfxm12]

She's upset that the recipes are different

If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice. Ok, these aren't cakes and cookies, so there's no need to be precise, so I do the recipe updates in my head anyway.

When updating the recipe, consider this. If you're laying it out on paper, at least keep a reference to the original recipe, a photo, etc. I have a professional cookbook like this. It has excerpts from journals from the 18th or 19th century with the original recipe, and also recontexualizes them for today's ingredients, tools and techniques. You get both the history and the dish.

[js2]

> When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-written in broken English, it makes me smile, because I can't not read it in my grandmother's voice.

You might enjoy listening to this when you have 10 minutes:

"The Last Batch of Fudge" – by Michael Imber

https://themoth.org/stories/the-last-batch-of-fudge

The Moth's web site is really slow so here's another link to that story in the episode:

https://overcast.fm/+mknK1k/38:45

[bb88]

That's one of the things I enjoy about Cook's Country on PBS. They like to dig into the historical contexts of dishes. Sometimes by researching in the past, they discover insights.

I was thinking of biscuit recipes where mixing was often done by feel of the dough, rather than exact amounts. Grandmas could just "feel" the amounts needed for their biscuits.

[pcl]

I have a professional cookbook like this

Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.

[wscott]

Indeed. When I entered "grandma's cookies" into the shared family instance is 'mealie' I was sure to include a copy of the "original" index card. (surely a copy) https://imgur.com/KMSuUhz

That card was has several fun comments and lots of history to my siblings who added to the crustiness of this card.

The original card I remember said to use lard or you can use margarine if you "haven't slaughtered a hog recently".

The recipe in mealie was modernized and tested more.

[Dylan16807]

Going through the same process with the same ingredients is also important to the personal connection. More important to me than the original wording. The note cards are great for looking at but I'm not going to work directly off them.

[arethuza]

I really wish I had kept a note of what my parents called "neeps and tatties" soup - which was served with thick oatcakes from the local baker.

I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).

[unsnap_biceps]

https://www.tinnedtomatoes.com/2013/09/scottish-tattie-neep-... is a stew recipe that looks similar to something I would have growing up. I think it was a basic stew with whatever was ready to eat, so we never had a specific recipe for it.

[jancsika]

> Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions.

It's probably to her chagrin because these aren't bit flips. They're slow changes in a living culinary repository that others have almost certainly ACK'd with their tastebuds over the years.

It's like you just made a bunch of unrelated commits on the main branch and slapped the commit message "fixed corruption" on it. Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access! :)

Do the responsible hacker thing here: fork your reproducible recipes into your own personal repo. Then you can reproduce them till your heart's content in the comfort of your own kitchen. And your mom can ask you for them if she ever wants to merge them into the main branch. (Narrator's voice: she doesn't.)

[IAmBroom]

One of the most beautiful translations from English to HNish that I've ever read.

Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?

[gdbsjjdn]

When people talk about the male loneliness epidemic I'm gonna pull this out as exhibit A of what's gone wrong.

[pitched]

I think you got that flipped. This is two people relating to each other. That’s what happens when it all goes right.

[Freak_NL]

> Honestly, you're lucky your mom didn't revoke your write access!

I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.

[VagabundoP]

She archived the repo after that.

[benstein]

LOL fork

[joshstrange]

I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

Next on my list is converting everything to mass where possible. It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

[indrora]

Even regional differences in things.

If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Then Europe comes along and all the fancy European butters are made in 250g blocks, which are bigger than the 110g sticks but smaller than the package of 4 of them! This always confused my European friends when I'd say "oh I'll toss in a stick of butter" because they thought I was adding a quarter kilo of butter.

[tavavex]

Meanwhile, here in Canada I've never seen "sticks of butter", only the large bricks. They're the same size as American ones, and labeled as 454g, but I only recently found out that in some places in the US, they cut them in fours. Before that, the phrase didn't mean anything to me, and I thought it referred to throwing the whole brick in. The smaller 250g packages also exist, but they're rare.

I can't guarantee that the sticks don't exist anywhere, but I've lived in several cities all over the country and I've never spotted anything like that

[bregma]

The 250 g half-bricks are very common. It's how the foo-foo frilly butter is sold ("cultured" butter, imported French butter with 94% fat content, butter made exclusively from milk squeezed from grass-fed cows, etc) because no one is willing to pay $15.00 for a pound of butter but they'll pay $8.00 for a half pound.

[inferiorhuman]

  I only recently found out that in some places in the US,
  they cut them in fours

That's pretty much the standard in the US. It's common enough that there's a bit of an east/west divide as to how the quarters are shaped. When I worked in a grocery store we'd also sell individual quarters (but I never actually saw anyone buy them as such).

[jandrewrogers]

Some American butter is wrapped in wax paper as regular sticks with measurement markers on it so that it is easy to measure. Plenty of large bricks though.

[guappa]

And here we use the markers to know how many grams that part is… how silly of us!

[xav0989]

I’ve seen them in stores in Canada, but they’re usually more expensive than the 454g blocks. Expensive enough that it’s usually better to buy the block and portion it as needed.

[philistine]

Typical Americana. Cutting up and packaging in extra foil what could simply be sold as a larger brick.

See also, milk bags.

[syncsynchalt]

Bricks won't fit in our butter trays. And it'd be an ordeal to open a brick, quarter it, then put the opened 3/4 of the brick back into cold storage until needed again.

Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.

[unsnap_biceps]

fancy butter is sometimes in foil, https://www.kerrygoldusa.com for example

[antonyh]

Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.

[kruador]

Blame the European regulators who decided that it was no longer necessary to have standard pack sizes.

Pack sizes were regulated in 1975 for volume measures (wine, beer, spirits, vinegar, oils, milk, water, and fruit juice) and in 1980 for weights (butter, cheese, salt, sugar, cereals [flour, pasta, rice, prepared cereals], dried fruits and vegetables, coffee, and a number of other things). In 2007, all of that was repealed - and member states were now forbidden from regulating pack sizes!

I think the rationale was that now the unit price (price per unit of measurement) was mandatory to display, consumers would still know which of two different packs on the same shelf was better value. But standard pack sizes don't just provide value-for-money comparisons, as this article shows.

[antonyh]

Ironically it seems (from memory, I've not researched it deeply) that continental butter has not changed from 250g, whereas the British brands have moved first to 200g. I could understand if they switched to 225g as essentially a half-pound block, but 200g isn't any closer to an useful Imperial measure than 250g.

[vidarh]

> but then we'd need to measure

Most butter here (and in a number of other countries) have measuring lines on the pack itself in 50g increments, so while I agree with you it's a nuisance to have an open one to deal with, the measurement part is usually a matter of using a knife along the marked line...

If the "certain brands" you refer to don't have those measuring lines, though, then a pox on them...

[antonyh]

I'm not sure about that, I've resisted buying those brands and it seems poor form to open them in the supermarket just to check.

[account42]

Do people here not always have an open pack of butter in their fridge?

[antonyh]

We have salted butter for the table, and unsalted for baking. We don't bake often enough to want unopened packs if we can avoid it.

[vidarh]

For my part: Only around christmas-time, as it's the only time I bake.

[dolmen]

Another dimension we have in France: most butter in 82% fat, but if are not careful you might buy so-called butter with much lower fat. Awful taste on morning toasts, ruined pastries.

[antonyh]

82% seems the norm here too, good to know this. Anything lower is labelled 'spread' (based on a very quick search, maybe not always true here). Oddly specific, so maybe there's regulation at play. We prefer French butter for the quality and because it comes in the correct size.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>bigger than the 110g sticks

There are four 110g sticks per package because each one is one quarter of the classic one pound (454g) package of butter, rounded down.

The European equivalent is a 125g package, which is flatter and wider than your square-profile 110g sticks.

[Freak_NL]

The 125 g package tends to be exclusive for more expensive brands though, or special stuff like salted butter. 250 g is the basic European packaging unit of butter, with the occasional 500 g for margarine.

[0xffff2]

> If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that I've heard called pats.

Wat. Never in my life have I seen butter in the (mostly western) US sold in anything other than 1/4 lb sticks. There are long, skinny sticks and short, fat sticks, but they're always 1/4 lb. If you say a "pat" of butter, you're getting roughly a 1/2 Tbsp of butter from me. Definitely not half a stick!

[nerdsniper]

Midwest, East Coast, and South I've seen some 1/2lb or 1lb blocks for fancier butters sometimes. But a pat of butter was definitely 1/4-1/2 tbsp of butter in the midwest - depending on if for toast (less) or for baking (exactly 1/2).

I've not heard "pat" used as a serious unit of volume since childhood though. In fact I rarely hear the word pat in relation to butter at all anymore.

[unwind]

I'd say (from northern Europe) that 500 g [1] is a standard pack of butter, even though they've also added the smaller "half packs" of 250 g. For professional use, there's also the full kilogram. Whoa that has got to be expensive these days.

[1]: https://www.arla.se/produkter/svenskt-smor/

[saalweachter]

One recipe in my family calls for butter "the size of two walnuts".

[davidinosauro]

In Italy this is a fairly common expression.

I've typically (only?) seen it on savory recipes though. For cakes and cookies you'd have quantities in grams.

[nerdsniper]

Also the tbsp and fluid ounce differ by 4% in the UK vs USA. This offsets the nominal 25% difference in pints, with UK pints having 20 oz and US pints having 16, closing the gap a bit to an actual 20.095% between the pints.

[thaumasiotes]

> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later.

This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.

[eesmith]

Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.

[thaumasiotes]

The entire point of my comment is that besides changes in size, there are also changes in ingredients.

[eesmith]

Implied by the Devil Dog mentioned later in the essay:

> And I will say this for the good folks in Hershey, Pa. It’s still the same damned good chocolate, what’s left of it. A replacement of whole by broken almonds 1s the only compromise with quality I’ve noticed, while I shudder to think what the “‘creme”’ inside a Devil Dog is made of these days.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Also, Hershey's "chocolate" tastes of vomit due to butyric acid from lipolysis

[dolmen]

Thanks for the explanation. Hershey's taste was really a disappointment on my first visit to the US. As a dark chocolate eater I still can't understand how this called chocolate.

[b800h]

Britisher here. I was disgusted to discover this when a colleague brought some from the US. I don't understand how anyone eats / ate this stuff.

[brnt]

My wife worked for a company that does this (for many large brands that you know of. Yes it always surprised me that they even farmed this out, they really only do marketing themselves anymore). Was a real eye opener.

[Ajedi32]

What's even easier than measuring with a kitchen scale is just throwing the entire can in and calling it good. That's often why these recipes used "boxes", "cans", etc as units of measurement in the first place. By converting to standard units you're increasing the amount of effort needed to actually make the dish. It might be more in keeping with the spirit of the recipe to just substitute similarly-sized cans or boxes, even if it's not quite the same taste. It depends on your priorities I suppose. (Though either way it's probably good to include units for the sake of clarity and reproducibility: e.g. "one 16 oz can" rather than "1 can".)

[joshstrange]

Agreed, I wouldn't say XXXX grams of Hershey's chocolate syrup, but I do want to know what size "a can" means.

On the other hand, for things that you would always measure (or need to do to sizes changing) like flour or sugar, I want that in grams for easy measuring. Even chocolate bars, might be easier to just say how much you need since getting exactly what you are looking for might be difficult/impossible.

[amatecha]

RE: finding what "1 can" or "1 bar" was, you may be able to scour archive.org for scans of old magazines and newspapers to see advertisements or product listings for the respective product? At least, that's one route I'd consider

[eesmith]

In 1981, the Betty Crocker Supreme Fudge Brownie Mix included a 5.5 oz can of Hershey's syrup. In 1949 you could get a 5 oz can when you purchase 2 quarts of ice cream. https://archive.org/details/mansfield-news-journal-1949-08-1...

It came in multiple sizes. 5 oz is probably the "small can" mentioned at https://archive.org/details/trinity-parish-of-newton-centre/... .

There was also a 16 oz can, https://archive.org/details/escanaba-daily-press-1964-12-10/... and https://archive.org/details/childrenasconsum0000mcne/page/11... and https://archive.org/details/The_Times_News_Idaho_Newspaper_1... and https://archive.org/details/cupl_004738/mode/2up?q=%22can+of... .

And an 8 pound can (!) for food services. https://archive.org/details/foodloversguidet0000harr_d5o7/pa...

[account42]

So what you're saying is that it's probably 8 pounds, right?

[amatecha]

wow haha, nice finds! that's awesome.

[klaff]

I remember the cans of Hershey's syrup, you opened them with a church key. This was the same era of oil cans with the special opener/spout you had to use. BTW, there's an unopened can of it on ebay for $25, claimed to be from the '60s, and is 5 1/2 ounces.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> It’s so much easier to measure with a kitchen scale than it is to wonder “did I pack the X in too tight or too loose into this cup?”.

Here in the UK, I get irrationally annoyed by seeing recipes that use "U.S." measurements. A "cup" is mostly meaningless to me as I've got lots of different size cups and as you state, it's not a consistent way to measure most ingredients (I can understand it being used for liquids, but even so why not just use ml or weight). When it comes to measuring larger ingredients (e.g. apricots) then the dimensions of this platonic cup come into play and I have to start deriving the optimal (almost) sphere packing to figure out how many apricots to use.

[inferiorhuman]

No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing. A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot. The issues surrounding volumetric measurements for dry goods is an entirely separate matter. 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots.

[flyinghamster]

Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones.

One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoons and tablespoons.

[kruador]

Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.

My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.

[inferiorhuman]

  Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. 

Well there's a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting to go down. I knew that Australian tablespoons (20 mL) were significantly different from US tablespoons. I didn't know that UK tablespoons were a whole different beast (14.2 mL), nor did I realize US tablespoons aren't quite 15 mL, and in fact my tablespoon measures are marked 15 mL. 15 mL is handily 1/16 of a US cup so it's easy enough to translate to 1/4 cup (4 tsbsp) and 1/3 cup (5 tbsp).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablespoon

[ndsipa_pomu]

> No need for scare quotes, US customary units are a thing.

I understand that other countries (probably North American ones) use the same system too, so thought I was clarifying, not scaring.

> A US customary cup is, at least, quite standard at 8 fluid ounces. This is more standardized than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot

I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age. Weighing something in grammes is easy and standardised (for most of the Earth's surface at least). Admittedly, imperial measurements can be problematic as a British pint is different to a U.S. pint and "fluid ounces" also have different definitions.

> 240 mL of apricots is just as useless as 1 cup of apricots

I agree - any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots". I've never seen mL used for measuring whole fruit - grammes would be appropriate for mashed fruit though.

[inferiorhuman]

  I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of
  metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age.

Right, but a cup is not an imperial unit of measure and metric cups didn't really catch on in the UK. So if you're looking at an older British recipe that references cups, good luck.

  any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots".

This is also a bad idea as common sizes for certain things change over time (e.g. some of the comments here talking about eggs). I don't eat too many apricots, but apples here can vary in size wildly even of the same variety.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Can't recall seeing any British recipe that uses cups so the difference between imperial and metric cups is irrelevant to us.

At least with something like "5 apricots", it should be obvious to the cook if they've got really small, big or varying sizes. Meanwhile, the "cup" measurement can vary depending on the order of which you put the apricots into the cup - do you put the smallest fruit in first, or the biggest?

[closewith]

> This is more standardised than the unit of measure used in British recipes and whatnot.

How so?

[inferiorhuman]

There's no such thing as an imperial cup ergo the cup is not a standardized measurement. Within US customary units the cup is defined.

[Fluorescence]

No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures you have to look up like a "gill".

Old family recipes would just say things like "add flour" and that amount was taught face-to-face and hands-on where you added enough till it looked "right" because onions and eggs etc. were not a uniform size.

[lmm]

> There's no such thing as an imperial cup ergo the cup is not a standardized measurement.

Which is probably part of why British recipes never say cup.

[qlm]

I’m in the UK too and you can buy measuring cups here easily. It doesn’t mean “a mug from your cupboard”. It _is_ a volume measurement.

I do agree it doesn’t make sense for things that aren’t fluid-like.

[ndsipa_pomu]

"Cups" are also usually labelled on measuring jugs too. I'd refuse on principle to buy a specific measuring cup.

[lostlogin]

I use the scales for everything and convert recipes to weight once I have them working.

It’s a game changer and works so much better.

[pjc50]

Note that UK measuring cups are not exactly the same size as US measuring cups, just as US and UK gallons are not the same size. Yes, this is infuriating. Fortunately you can buy US ones over the internet, or convert it into metric like a normal person.

[traceroute66]

> It _is_ a volume measurement

Yawn.

Except there's no such thing as a "volume measurement":

   - The so-called "cups" will have different manufacturing processes, some will be a bit smaller, some will be bit larger.  Plastic cups will warp and deform with time.
   - When measuring dry materials like flour, the amount in your "cup" depends on your usage.  Are you weighing sifted flour or flour out of the bag ?  Are you accidentally/deliberately compressing the dry goods when using your cup ? (e.g. are you scooping straight from the bag of flour).
   - etc. etc. etc.

Just weight the damn ingredients using a scale. There's a reason no professional kitchen in the world uses "cups".

[eesmith]

I fully agree that weighing is better, but if you apply your standards to weighing you'll end up concluding there's also no such thing as "weight measurement."

- The so-called "weight" will differ depending on the type of scale and how it's used. People used mechanical kitchen scales just fine even when some measured a bit less and a bit more

- While digital scales can be more accurate, accuracy can still vary, and of course the reported weight can vary depending on where an object is on the scale or how the scale is set up. (Yes, I've used a scale that wasn't on a smooth flat surface. It worked out fine.)

- "Dry materials" like flour are hygroscopic, and even though weighing is better than measuring by volume, you end up weighing the flour + water, when what you want is just the weight of the flour (e.g. you may have to consider the storage history of your flour)

- There's the ~0.4 % weight difference between the equator and the poles.

Yes, these are all very picky, but that's how your "no such thing as" comes across to someone who grew up using volume measurement in the home kitchen.

Instead, simply say that weight measurement results in more reliable and predictable cooking. Perhaps also add that cleanup can be a lot easier when ingredients don't need intermediate staging.

[fireflash38]

For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate?

It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know?

At least a gram is a gram is a gram everywhere in the world!

[traceroute66]

> Are you weighing your eggs?

Yes, always.

I don't know what its like where you are, but where I am you can get eggs either in mixed packets, or sorted by size.

So where I am, 1 egg != 1 egg unless you weigh it.

It doesn't matter for soufflé's or meringues. But for everything else you'll have problems if you use random sized eggs.

> Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air?

Absorption capability of flour tends to be more important.

> Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven

Put it in fan mode and reduce the temperature. Hot spot problem disappears.

[Dylan16807]

A nice packed cup can fit like 50% more than a very loose cup. It's a much bigger issue "exact precision".

For eggs, as long as you know the right category of egg it'll be within 10% and that's a lot less of a worry.

[t-3]

Professional kitchens doing environmentally-sensitive cooking are going to have climate controlled areas and tools that make that work. Your kitchen probably doesn't. Many recipes will have wildly varying demands for flour (among other things) based on humidity, ambient temperature, elevation, the water, and the flour being used. Volume estimates end up being more accurate to the process than precise weights.

[slumberlust]

We are still on the imperial system as a whole. Even within the US people who bake know weight measurement is king.

[account42]

Often the precise amount doesn't really matter though. Likely it was "one can" to begin with because that's just what was convenient and not because the recipe has been optimized to that size.

I guess it depends how much you care about perfectly reproducing the exact same dish. For personal cooking I usually don't - a bit of variance is not a negative thing.

[GeekyBear]

I recently made an old family recipe for carrot cake, and the cream cheese frosting called for "a box" of confectioners sugar and "a package" of cream cheese.

[nvader]

After reading this, I have to comment with this link to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-inst...

This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.

[FearNotDaniel]

Yes, except for this part:

> The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale

This bears repeating a thousand times over because the political-economic lessons have still not been learned: the famine in Ireland was not caused by potato blight. The island of Ireland at the time was growing more than enough crops to feed its people. The famine was caused by the British Government of the time refusing to divert resources in order to prevent starvation. A “Christian” government that, with the support of its electors, had no problem deciding that some ethnic groups among its citizens were somehow less human than those of the majority.

[closewith]

Yes, it was a straight genocide, of the kind so common in territories that were subject to crown control.

[FearNotDaniel]

I disagree strongly that this abhorrent and preventable tragedy should be categorised as genocide. The rich, protestant English looked down on the catholic Irish peasants as an inferior race, they blamed the Irish for their own suffering, supposedly due to fecklessness, stupidity, laziness etc, and they were happy to sit back and allow the poor farmers to starve. But that’s not the same thing at all as actively wishing for the outright destruction of a whole people. The system relied on having peasant workers to work the farms of the landholders - it was not in the British interest, either economically or ideologically, to eliminate them completely in the same way that Nazi Germany wished for the Jewish people.

It’s true that the British perpetrated many other awful atrocities in their pursuit of Empire - as did all the other Empire-building nations at the time - but I’d like to see you come up with a list of the ones you can convincingly describe as genocide.

[closewith]

The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.

This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I was enjoying reading that until I hit this line:

> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process

Whatever the potatoes were swimming in, it wasn't gluten.

By the way, the discussion of mashed potatoes reminds me of the excellent old "Smash" adverts on UK TV that featured martians/robots and a tagline of "For mash get Smash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM

(Smash was surprisingly popular in the 1970s but then UK convenience food was abysmal back then)

[teddyh]

The third footnote in that article, in its entirety:

> Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.

Is this what passes for a reference now?

[kruador]

The text that the footnote is attached to is:

"Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF." I infer 'IMPish' as meaning 'like Instant Mashed Potato'.

I read that footnote as a somewhat oblique criticism of two LLMs, rather than on the statistic itself - which may indeed have just been fabricated by the LLM as opposed to an actual statistic somehow dredged from its training data, or pulled from a web search.

[grey-area]

Really depressing to think that people trust statistics from these models and soon the models will be ingesting statistics they themselves made up as training data.

[airstrike]

Please consider publishing that somewhere! Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

[throwaway173738]

Seconding this! I would pay between $20 and $30 for a text that provided detailed information on variability in ingredients and how to measure or eyeball it and what to do to mitigate it.

[dolmen]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248272

[mathgeek]

> Dozens of us would appreciate it. I could even watch a small Netflix series about this, tbh

Sure, but you'd spend the rest of your life lamenting that the second season got cancelled, never finding out the answer to the cliffhanger about the recipes the author was going to tackle next.

[Blahah]

What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.

[tbcj]

Agreed. Salt is captivating and I’m grateful for the undergrad professor who assigned it in a class.

[Freak_NL]

> […] in MKS units, preferring mass, when possible, over volume.

I can imagine the chagrin. Americans tend to measure a lot in cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons. Anyone who uses recipes from all over the world would be well advised to simply get a set of cups (get one that stacks the 1, ¾, ½, ⅓, ¼ measures etc. as a Matroska doll) and a ring of measuring spoons.

I hope you didn't take away her Fahrenheits too — nonsensical as they are to the rest of the world.

[closewith]

You'll need many sets as US cup sizes are different to UK cup sizes and other customary units.

[Freak_NL]

Not at all — just the US cups will do. Modern UK recipes tend to use tablespoons and teaspoons, but not cups.

[maebert]

I inherited my great-grandmas recipe book that calls for "50 pence [pfennig] worth of almonds".

I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.

[mkovach]

It reminds me of one of Grandma Bicker's favorite mantras: "Measure twice, bake once!"

She baked right up until the end, whisk in hand, oxygen tank nearby, unapologetically dusted in flour like a retired magician still performing card tricks at the grocery store. Diagnosed with a rare lung condition, one that typically affected middle-aged Black men, which she most definitely was not, Grandma took the news with a shrug and a Bundt cake.

Every treatment day, she'd show up to the clinic armed with two to three dozen baked goods and a stack of handwritten recipes. "These are for YOU to bake," she'd announce, passing out snickerdoodles and no-nonsense instructions. "Because baking keeps your mind off being sick, and out of daytime television. Okay, maybe not that last one!"

She never trusted the measurements on store-bought mixes. "Don't trust the box!" she'd warn, scribbling revised amounts in large, looping script over any corporate estimate. Boxes, after all, were not to be trusted. Not in baking. Not in medicine. Certainly not in life.

At her funeral, two or three of the clinic men came, not with flowers, but with Tupperware. Cookies. Cupcakes. Homemade tributes, slightly lopsided, carefully but imperfectly iced, and utterly perfect.

Somewhere, in the vast afterlife, she is smiling and saying, "See, I told you," while waiting for the next batch to be ready.

[zurtri]

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

[joshvm]

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.

A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.

[unwind]

Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about.

Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestive_biscuit

[joshvm]

Well also that you can buy graham cracker crumbs, for making things like pie crusts. My friend gave me a weird look when we went shopping and I picked up whole crackers. And then the revelation that graham refers to a type of flour and is not in itself a brand. And Kelloggs sell the crumbs? Wild.

A biscuit base in the UK would usually require a pack of digestives and a rolling pin. I suppose some supermarket sells crumbled biscuits but...

As an aside, Golden Grahams used to be popular in the UK and I don't think anyone stopped to ask what the name meant.

[dolmen]

Golden Grahams is popular in France too, but as a foreign name, nobody ever looked it up.

[dpflug]

Digestives are a bit thicker, but the ones I had while over there weren't substantially so. You're less likely to get the shared experience of dealing with the goopy mess all over your fingers because your graham is shattering at the first bite.

[bigmanjon]

Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.

[MrWB]

If you’re in the UK/Europe, the best alternative I’ve found are Bahlsen’s Milk Dark Chocolate Leibniz.

Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.

[joncrocks]

I think another option is chocolate 'malted milk' (in the UK) - depending on your preference for ratio of biscuit to chocolate to marshmallow. Leibniz will have more/thicker chocolate, but malted milk will break a bit easier in the mouth (softer/crumblier biscuit).

[rtpg]

I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.

But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.

We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.

[e28eta]

I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.

The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter

[extraduder_ire]

6 large (US) eggs is between 12oz and 14.5oz.[0] This has been stuck in my head since I first learned European sizes were different.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...

[thaumasiotes]

Could the six eggshells weigh half an ounce each? It's easier to weigh eggs whole.

That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.

[extraduder_ire]

That table includes the weight of the shell. I don't think six chicken eggs of a normal size were ever a pound.

[al_borland]

This is very interesting.

I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.

I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.

[bobthepanda]

Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.

If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.

[Stratoscope]

If you see this reply, may I ask a favor?

The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon.

I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT, and we found the recipe below.

Could you check your cookbook to see if it has a recipe like this, and possibly take a photo and send it to me? Email is in my profile. Thanks!

---

Old-Fashioned Baked Macaroni and Cheese (circa 1950s BH&G style)

Ingredients:

1½ cups elbow macaroni (uncooked)

2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese

2 eggs, beaten

2 cups milk (sometimes evaporated milk was used)

1 tsp salt

Dash of pepper

Optional: breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs for topping

Optional: butter for dotting the top

Instructions:

Cook the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain.

In a large bowl, combine the hot macaroni with most of the grated cheese.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, salt, and pepper.

Pour the egg-milk mixture over the macaroni and cheese, stir gently to combine.

Pour into a buttered casserole dish. Top with the remaining cheese, and optionally a layer of buttered breadcrumbs or crushed crackers.

Bake at 350°F for about 45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned on top.

[perihelions]

By chance, someone posted the text on Reddit two years ago,

https://old.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/ydmncf/searchi... ("From Better homes and gardens cookbook 1953")

The one in this very specific 1953 cookbook is not an egg-based custard, but uses as a thickening agent condensed mushroom soup, from a can.

[Stratoscope]

Very interesting, thanks! That one is very different from what my little sister and I made as kids. Ours was more like the one from ChatGPT that I posted above.

We were big fans of cream of mushroom soup, though. Our favorite was to mix a can of that and a can of tomato soup (with the usual 50/50 dilution with water). We called it "cream of tomato".

[mgiampapa]

My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.

I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.

[encoderer]

I tried my best to update several of my family recipes.

A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”.

This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

[waste_monk]

>This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

This site [1] has some interesting info:

[1886] "The average weight of twenty eggs laid by fowls of different breeds is two and one-eighth pounds. The breeds that lay the largest eggs, average seven to a pound, are Black Spanish, Houdans, La Fleches, and Creve Coeures. Eggs of medium size and weight, averaging eight or nine to a pound, are laid by Leghorns, Cochins, Brahmins, Polands, Dorkings, Games, Sultans. Hamburgs lay about ten eggs to a pound. Thus there is a difference of three eggs in one pound weight. Hence it is claimed that in justice to the consumer eggs should be sold by weight." ---The Grocers' Hand-Book and Directory, Artemas Ward [Philadelphia Grocer Publishing:Philadelphia] 1886 (p. 67)

With similar figures given for 1911 as well. Which would suggest a normal egg in 1905 would be approximately 56g (1 pound/ 8 eggs = 0.125lb per egg).

[1] https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodeggs.html

[saalweachter]

That "approximately" is too approximate.

2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes.

(Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.)

So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.

[dolmen]

As "egg-sized" refers to volume, what quantity of butter would that be?

[tetha]

There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"

[encoderer]

Thank you! I never considered it a relative measurement.

[rendaw]

> The downside is that these recipes miss out on the advanced chemistry that went into making these boxed mixes so great to begin with. But, in my opinion, that's a small price to pay for reproducibility.

Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...

[teekert]

Hero.

I wonder to what degree "the recipes are different" are because over time almost any "basic-not-so-basic" ingredient got more sugar and salt added, for commercial/get-them-addicted reasons. You are in a nice position to comment on this I think.

Btw, I think the point of a family recipe is to let it evolve, put something of yourself in it. You can "change it back", but you can also become that grandfather that really spiced up a recipe.

Het in the Netherlands our grandparent boiled veggies to death, making everything bland, hen add meat for flavor. Really bad once you've head a taste of Italian of even Japanese cuisine. But one can spice up kale (boerenkool) with some vinegar and mustard for example.

[desi_ninja]

Some day I will do a internet deep dive which generation of Americans shifted to premade mixed and stopped cooking things from scratch. Nothing wrong with that, just different especially in grandma generation.

[acomjean]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix

[justsomehnguy]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45245450

And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.

[mathgeek]

Generally it's attributed to the time around WW2, which for Americans included the effects of rationing as well as being exposed to prepackaged foods while deployed. Throw in a bunch of marketing and nationalism and the breadcrumbs start to line up. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/from-the-fro...

If you really go down the rabbit hole, you start to see how many of the foods that baby boomers grew up on were first fed widely to the parents during the war.

[The28thDuck]

When I first read this I was surprised by how seriously you took your measurements of food and loled. Your example on the end makes sense though. Interesting for certain.

[frainfreeze]

Very interesting! Have you by any chance shared the recepies anywhere?

[sublinear]

There's a lot of comments on this, but nobody mentioned the similar job of maintaining and auditing an internal package mirror.

[Balgair]

Wait I thought Gris Michel went extinct?!

Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?

[striking]

Miami Fruit will reportedly ship them to you. Unless you live in California or Hawaii, much to my chagrin...

[ggm]

They cannot be shipped to locations which grow commercial cavendish for risks of viral infection. Australia has restrictions in place on movement of all kinds of fruit and vegetables inter-state for exactly this reason.

Also, if travelling in S.E.Asia try the small "sugar bananas" and ladyfinger, commonly available in a few places alongside some of the dozens and dozens of "not-cavendish" bananas that locals eat.

[pests]

Link for the lazy:

https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...

$17 for a single fruit!

[kemayo]

Lucille Bluth underestimated, it turns out!

(Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )

[dghlsakjg]

She was dead on if you account for inflation.

$10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.

[Dylan16807]

Nah, that's inflation.

[Larrikin]

Wow this site is great, definitely a new go to for gifts.

Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?

[thaumasiotes]

https://pacificwildpick.com/products/square-watermelon-gift-...

[scheme271]

I've seen a few places sell them. It's a specialty item and I suspect you need a specialty grocer or be some place where you can grow them. (e.g. in the tropics or semi-tropical spots, you can grow a variety of banana varieties that you can't really find in stores).

[AlotOfReading]

They still exist, mainly on small scale farms in tropical countries. You can find them in local markets.

[iamwil]

Gosh, you need to write a book. Totally serious. Someone needs to document it.

[jjkaczor]

Uh... I would buy this cookbook... I suspect many others would as well...