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Xiahou Dun posted:Fair criticism, but when I started learning to cook as a kid my mom basically all but slapped measurements out of my hand because she wanted me to learn to do it by eye (when not baking or whatever). Or like my Oma would have measurements like "cut onions until you don't feel like cutting onions anymore and want a cigarette". Same here. I once asked my mom to make her superb bread with me watching so that I could write it down. The recipe that I wrote down begins with a yellow bowl of warm water, and everything else is a handful of this and a smidge of that. To this day I am constitutionally incapable of following a recipe exactly, even when I really mean to do so. (I love Kenji too, but I think he would really hate me.)
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Dec 19, 2019 19:25
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Xiahou Dun posted:Fair criticism, but when I started learning to cook as a kid my mom basically all but slapped measurements out of my hand because she wanted me to learn to do it by eye (when not baking or whatever). Or like my Oma would have measurements like "cut onions until you don't feel like cutting onions anymore and want a cigarette". If you cook from measurements enough, you'll get the same feel for how much to add without the years of making garbage first because you've just been guessing how much salt to add. Recipe calls for 1 tsp of cumin, measure it out, then dump it into your palm to get an idea, then toss it in the pot and see what it looks like in there. Now you haven't hosed up tonight's dish, and if you do it a couple more times maybe you'll start to get a feel for it. I can't see how this method would be any slower/worse than dialing in over the course of many ruined meals where you just tossed in an arbitrary quantity of poo poo, half a dozen independent variables with each iteration. "I know what I'm doing," I declare, "Through trial and error I've discovered how much oil needs to go in a 2011 Ford Focus. Yes, this is my seventh engine, why do you ask?"
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Dec 19, 2019 20:10
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My physics prof in undergrad had a mom who cooked entirely by feel. He wanted to learn how to make her cookies, so he just got a precise scale and some weigh papers, helped her make a batch, and got the recipe that way.
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Dec 19, 2019 20:11
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Pham Nuwen posted:Recipe calls for 1 tsp of cumin, measure it out, then dump it into your palm to get an idea, then toss it in the pot and see what it looks like in there.
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Dec 19, 2019 20:16
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There's nothing I can't oversalt. The first time I made Sunday gravy, the salt grinder exploded over the pot. Even after whisking out as much as I could, it was really salty. The fourth time, I decided to salt-cure the beef overnight. Which made for very good, very salty beef.
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Dec 19, 2019 20:17
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Halloween Jack posted:There's nothing I can't oversalt. The first time I made Sunday gravy, the salt grinder exploded over the pot. Even after whisking out as much as I could, it was really salty. Make it pig next time and you can stock your very own 19th-century naval vessel!
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Dec 19, 2019 22:00
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Carillon posted:Make it pig next time and you can stock your very own 19th-century naval vessel! Corned beef was also a common naval provision.
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Dec 19, 2019 22:08
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Pham Nuwen posted:If you cook from measurements enough, you'll get the same feel for how much to add without the years of making garbage first because you've just been guessing how much salt to add. Recipe calls for 1 tsp of cumin, measure it out, then dump it into your palm to get an idea, then toss it in the pot and see what it looks like in there. Now you haven't hosed up tonight's dish, and if you do it a couple more times maybe you'll start to get a feel for it. I can't see how this method would be any slower/worse than dialing in over the course of many ruined meals where you just tossed in an arbitrary quantity of poo poo, half a dozen independent variables with each iteration. O I am 100% not saying this is good teaching. Just saying it’s a way that exists. My kids are getting taught with actual measurements cause that was hell.
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Dec 19, 2019 22:29
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I feel like such a loving idiot for never figuring out this intermediate step holy poo poo. Me too. ...although my parents taught me to cook partially by smell. I really can't explain some of dad's recipes better than "If it smells like this, it's right".
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Dec 19, 2019 22:47
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Precise measurements in recipes only even remotely starts to make sense once industrial production starts spitting out an endless stream of ingredients whose quality is reliably homogeneous, and food can be stored in conditions to preserve that homogeneity. And while being able to measure poo poo by eye is a useful skill, in most cases it's not as valuable as being able to taste and adjust during preparation whenever possible, because no two cloves of garlic or sprigs of rosemary or whatever are identical. This is problem even more pronounced for pre-modern recipes, because what cultivars of e.g. garlic and rosemary employed by the recipe writer could reasonably be expected to be different from those available to most of their contemporary readers.
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Dec 19, 2019 23:56
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Triple or quadruple the garlic in every recipe.
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Dec 20, 2019 00:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Triple or quadruple the garlic in every recipe. This has worked out great for me but poorly for my fiancé
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Dec 20, 2019 00:40
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Internet Wizard posted:This has worked out great for me but poorly for my fiancé Date better.
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Dec 20, 2019 01:01
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Halloween Jack posted:Triple or quadruple the garlic in every recipe. I am 100% aware of the difference between a clove of garlic and a head of garlic. However, if a recipe calls for a clove of garlic, that poo poo is getting a whole head. And what's this "1/4 teaspoon of cayenne" bullshit? Maybe for a single serving recipe, but sheeit...I put 1/4 teaspoon in my hot cocoa...
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Dec 20, 2019 01:16
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I mentioned it upthread but how my Oma taught me to cook in like everything and she said, "Schneid die Knloblauch und Zwiebeln ab bis man braucht ein Zigarette". (Chop the garlic and onions until you need a cigarette.) I was like 8. She was the best.
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Dec 20, 2019 01:29
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Halloween Jack posted:There's nothing I can't oversalt. The first time I made Sunday gravy, the salt grinder exploded over the pot. Even after whisking out as much as I could, it was really salty. If you're cooking something liquidy like a soup or a stew or a curry or something, you can repair oversalting by cutting a raw potato in half and sticking it in the pot during the simmering; then discarding if need be at the end. The potato will absorb excess salt out of the stew.
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Dec 20, 2019 03:05
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I've been looking at 15th/16th century English recipes and in addition to the "some of it! you'll know how much" quantities, many of them also have steps that don't quite translate to modern foods. For example, take this "gyngerbrede" recipe (http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec42.htm). The first step to boil the honey, and skim the scum off. If you try it with store-bought honey, there really isn't any scum to skim, because the honey's already clean. Similarly, some meat recipes have a little note up front to boil/parboil/quickly boil whatever meat you're using, before you then proceed to cook it in [other method]. This was a method of cleaning the meat which we don't really do much any more. Which recipes mention this seem to be mostly up to the mood of whoever was writing it. An example of recipe inconsistency is the tart recipes of "The Good Huswifes Jewell" (you can read it online here http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ghj1596.txt) where there's a ton of different recipes for tarts! Some only describe how to make the filling (the crust being implicit). Some mention that you should dump the filling in the crust (that you've presumably made already), and one or two do actually note that you bake the crust, or have special instructions how to bake the filling with the crust. This is all within the same book! Like, here's one that mentions no crust: quote:To make a tarte with butter but then, this one has a note to close up the tart and bake for a surprisingly explicit 3/4 of an hour: quote:To make a close Tarte of Cherries. I've tried cooking some 15th/16th century English food and, uh, you need to really know what you're doing as a cook before you can successfully cook from these recipes, because there's just so much implicit stuff in them.
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Dec 20, 2019 06:36
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Just read a blurb in a book about what's considered the first chain restaurant, The Harvey House. Thought it might be of interest to the thread! Long story short, this fellow Fred Harvey immigrates to the US from London in 1853 and gets a dishpit job. He works his way up to being a cook and learns a lot about the biz. He ends up moving to New Orleans, and gets a lucrative job for one the ever-expanding railways. During his stint there, he realized just how awful the food was not only on the trains, but the stations. (I guess in the 1800's, stand-up comedians would joke "just what is the deal with train food? You don't even get a sack of peanuts, just some rotten meat, amirite?") He sets out to improve the situation, but the rail he worked for wasn't having it. He successfully pitches his idea to another railway, and opens his first restaurant in one of their hubs. The idea completely takes off, and soon the Santa Fe line has him opening a restaurant every few hundred miles as they expand westward. Boom, first chain restaurant! There's a lot more to his story, including how he empowered a lot of women to move away and make what was mad bank at the time to become a "Harvey Girl". In hindsight it's a bit icky that he only hired young, attractive, white women to be waitresses, but he did give a lot of young uneducated women a chance to get out of their poo poo situations, become independent, see America, and do something besides be baby factories. One thing the wikipedia article doesn't mention, but the bit I read in this book did: in order to accommodate the rush of "holy poo poo, a train is coming in, how do we serve hundreds of people all coming in at the same time", they had an ingenious plan. Passengers were given a paper menu, which they filled out while a ways away from the station. The train would then send in the orders by telegraph, allowing the staff to start firing the orders. (As a line cook who cringes when FOH comes back to the kitchen and says "we just sat an 18 top", this guy's system is better than most modern restaurants!) So imo, dude invented the phone-ordering app. In the 1870's. Pretty cool, huh? wiki links for those wanting to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_(entrepreneur) JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Dec 20, 2019 |
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Dec 20, 2019 19:43
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Just read a blurb in a book about what's considered the first chain restaurant, The Harvey House. Thought it might be of interest to the thread! There's a Harvey House museum in Belen, about a 30 minute drive from my place. I've been meaning to go check it out some time. I wonder what a cross-country train trip, eating and sleeping at this sort of establishment, cost when translated into 2019 dollars? It sounds like it was very pleasant but rather time-consuming (although nothing compared to a stagecoach trip, which you can read about in Mark Twain's "Roughing It")
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Dec 20, 2019 19:58
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Theres one near me I think that does pretty good meals with game meat that I have been told I need to check out.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:04
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Pham Nuwen posted:"I know what I'm doing," I declare, "Through trial and error I've discovered how much oil needs to go in a 2011 Ford Focus. Yes, this is my seventh engine, why do you ask?" I used exact measurements until I got confident with my eyeballing but definitely learned the hard way with cars. Also, help, please help, historical cooking thread: This is a little obscure, but does anyone in this thread know of any books or sources of mid-late 19th century recipes from the Northeast? My gradma was talking about her grandma's cooking and wanted to try something from there. Her grandma was descended from Dutch settlers in NY and those Puritan lunatics up in Massachusetts dating back to like the very early colonies apparently. I'd like to try to find something simple and surprise her on Christmas.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:28
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:An example of recipe inconsistency is the tart recipes of "The Good Huswifes Jewell" (you can read it online here http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/ghj1596.txt) where there's a ton of different recipes for tarts! Some only describe how to make the filling (the crust being implicit). Some mention that you should dump the filling in the crust (that you've presumably made already), and one or two do actually note that you bake the crust, or have special instructions how to bake the filling with the crust. This is all within the same book! Pie crusts at this time in this part of the world would have been one of the most rudimentary basics of cooking, often defined by simple ratio of fat to flour, and thus known to most if not all chefs. I have one such ratio in a 17th century Dutch cookbook, but I don't have it at hand at the moment. However, even the ratio was not particularly important, because the main idea was to have a solid clay-like structure that could contain the pie filling as it baked. The crust itself was often not eaten, and sometimes they were even reused. The crust served more as a piece of baking equipment and a storage container than as a part of the meal. If you think of a Trencher, an old piece of bread that served as a bowl or plate, this was a similar idea. The fat which was available at different times of year would also vary, so the crusts were interchangeable and largely unimportant. You must completely abandon everything you know about pies and start with a fresh mind if you hope to conceive of pie crusts in the same way that these people did.  quote:The cases, which could be several inches thick, according to Janet Clarkson, author of Pie: A History, were perhaps not even intended to be edible. Even once fat had begun to be added to the dough, bringing us into the realm of modern pastry, a pie crust was still sometimes considered more as a kind of primitive Tupperware. The quantities of ingredients were also often not specified because of reasons of seasonal availability. You wouldn't have to make a new pie until the old pie was consumed, and that time could vary, so depending on when you were baking would also determine the size of the following pie. Sometimes ingredients existed in abundance and needed to be used up, and at other times less so, so the scale of the pie depended on external circumstance. Thus, the size of the pie or tart could also vary wildly, and sometimes pies were made of enormous size, up to several feet in diameter. Some of these pies that were kept for a year would contain all manner of ingredients, including among other things for instance, entire birds.  quote:In the Middle Ages, fruit was added to the pie as a preservative, the most common being raisins, apples, and currants. Other ingredients included the new Eastern spices, meat from several game birds and other game animals, sugar, suet, and molasses (possibly even black treacle). Mincemeat pies were bigger then. The largest recorded pie in the Middle Ages was about 9 feet in diameter and weighed around 165 pounds. It contained two bushels of flour (which could be anywhere from 84-120 pounds of flour depending on the type of flour), 20 pounds of butter, four geese, two rabbits, four ducks, two woodcocks, six snipes (type of bird), four partridges, two cow tongues, two curlews (type of bird), six pigeons, and seven blackbirds. The pie shell would work as sort of fridge to contain the ingredients, which were often preserved with copious amounts of liquor and spices with antibacterial properties such as cinnamon or nutmeg. In such cases you would often bake together a great mess of ingredients into a massive pie that would sit around in your kitchen for months, and whenever you were hungry you could just dig around in there and look for something to eat. If you were making this type of pie the crust would be several inches thick to contain all this, as well as to ensure that rodents didn't gnaw a hole that would threaten the structural integrity of the pie. twoday fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 20, 2019 |
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Dec 20, 2019 23:20
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twoday posted:Some of these pies that were kept for a year would contain all manner of ingredients, including among other things for instance, entire birds.
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Dec 21, 2019 01:06
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Also, help, please help, historical cooking thread: My grandparents were both first generation American children of Dutch immigrants in a town consisting entirely of other Dutch people to the point where your only church options were Dutch Reform or Orthodox Presbyterian and frankly everything they cooked was god awful. The combination of cheapness (frugality!) and blandness(to quiet those pesky passions!) made eating even what should have been amazing fresh garden vegetables and dairy from the farm into an exercise in self control just to get anything down. My mom recalls with horror being forced to eat every single part of the one cow they’d slaughter each year prepared as “boil in pot for X hours or until it’s grey enough” paired with “boil this vegetable until it no longer has color”. The only spice allowed in the house was bay leaves, anything else was “too spicy” including black pepper. My recommendation is to steal a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe and lie like there’s no tomorrow.
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Dec 21, 2019 01:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I used exact measurements until I got confident with my eyeballing but definitely learned the hard way with cars. Get a book by Peter Rose, she is the expert in this field. http://www.peterrose.com/dutch-recipes.html
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Dec 21, 2019 02:00
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I used exact measurements until I got confident with my eyeballing but definitely learned the hard way with cars. The Fanny Farmer cookbook was written precisely for you, friend. The older editions (many available for free online) are chock full of 19th century Northeastern cookery.
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Dec 21, 2019 03:19
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This is also a thing to bear in mind with Indian recipes. They’re gonna tell you to use a tablespoon of oil. These are lies. The reality is that you use enough oil that it forms a deep enough layer that when you add your whole spices, they are submerged completely. This is why the tarka pan is so popular. You don’t want the curry leaves to lightly cook, you want them to deep fry when they hit the oil. You don’t want to bathe your kitchen in mustard seeds, you want them to drown in the oil enough that only a few strays hit your face. And the thing is, we all do it by instinct, so you don’t even tell the oil amount for a recipe because you assume everyone does that. And then the foreigners come with their wanting measurements. So the auntie is all “I don’t know. Like a tablespoon?” (Or, in the case of Manjula, a table-espoon.) Same goes for spices. You want enough that each bite of food gets a bit of that spice on it, and not much more than that, because spices are expensive, and granny will cut your throat while you sleep if you waste spices like that. And the thing is, it doesn’t scale well. You’re taught to use the bare minimum amount of spices you can get away with. 1 cup of rice will get like 1 - 2 cardamom pods. 4 cups of rice gets maybe 3.
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Dec 21, 2019 14:45
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Manjula is fabulous. I love her Aloo Methi.
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Dec 21, 2019 15:24
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https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Cookbooks_and_Cooking_(Bookshelf) One of my favorite go-tos when bored. Currently reading "The Curry Cooks Assistant" to the boyfriend, he is mildly horrified how anglos tried to ruin his cuisine.
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Dec 21, 2019 15:54
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twoday posted:pies! Good stuff. Inspired by this I went back to the pies section of one of my cookbooks, and have cooked a salmon pie that has the vague shape of a fish and a thoroughly inedible flour+water crust. Fish was great, but the crust was seriously awful. Apparently, the way that the rich Tudor diners dealt with this technically-edible-but-terrible crust was to do the same thing rich Tudor diners did with their leftovers - they gave it to beggars after they finished eating. Which, uh, hmm. That's not a thing I'm attempting to replicate. For many reasons. I would post pictures but have never really posted pictures before, does anybody have a recommended image host?
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Dec 23, 2019 03:42
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Imgur works just fine!
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Dec 23, 2019 03:47
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Another from the Clwyd Cookbook, since 'tis the season Plum Pudding ca. 1765 
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Dec 23, 2019 05:12
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I am clearly too old for the internet now, because I went to imgur saw "Tomorrow's memes, today!" at the top and a giant wall of gifs and memes apparently sorted by "Most Viral" and, well, it might work fine as an image uploader but also: oh no. I am only saying that it was a very strong first impression. Anyhow! The recipe I attempted to loosely follow came from Peter Brears' "Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England", interpreted from the original recipe from Robert May's "The Accomplisht Cook" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accomplisht_Cook). Technically this cookbook is from 1660 which might stretch the whole "early" Stuart thing, but it's also probable that similar recipes were in circulation earlier. The page number in Brears' book doesn't match quite up with the page number of the scan I have, but the original recipe (if the scan I have is real) is as follows:  Brears' interpreted recipe uses salmon, and butter instead of lard. Aside from that, it's basically as written, but with proportions. It also doesn't do the thing at the end where it says "being baked, fill it up with clarified butter", which I assume was in order to help it keep? That's what the funnel on top was used for. There's a recipe of The Good Housewife's Jewel for "stuff you pour into pies" as well, so I assume dumping liquid into baked pies was a somewhat common practice. twoday might have more insight on that. Anyways, pictures. Here's me shaping the crust (the crust is just straight hot water and flour and it suuuucks to eat):  You may notice the fins. I added "fins" to it mostly because I was like "Well here's some extra dough. I guess I should...add fins? Yes this is a great idea." You can tell that I have neither knowledge of what a fish actually looks like, nor any skill in at artistic endeavours. After inserting the spices, butter, and salmon (I really should have gotten a picture of that for completion's sake but it's not super interesting), it's closed up and brushed with egg wash.  Then I dumped it in the oven at a reasonable 300 degrees while I went and made a spinach pie and left it in a little too long. Here it is some time later, after it's been retrieved:  You can see from the above that my presentation skills are...well, they could use some work. Here it is, opened up (the lighting makes the salmon look basically colorless but there was more color than that):  The salmon was a tad overcooked, but generally delicious otherwise. I have low standards for salmon though, I really like it and it's kind of hard to mess up too bad, so take that with a grain of salt. It was interesting and fun, and actually a lot less work than I'd expected. To be honest you could get...a very similar thing with parchment paper/foil with a lot less overhead. However for a dinner party I could see something like this being a really cool centerpiece dish. "Stuff in disposable crust" isn't really a thing nowadays so it'd be novel, and if you had a lot more artistic chops than me you could probably make it look real elegant.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:45
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:"Stuff in disposable crust" isn't really a thing nowadays so it'd be novel, and if you had a lot more artistic chops than me you could probably make it look real elegant.
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Dec 23, 2019 05:51
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Hirayuki posted:Well, "salt-crusted fish/etc." has been a thing for a while now. https://kitchenjoyblog.com/whole-fish-baked-salt-crust/ Huh, so it is. Well, let me then amend that for my un-hip self and friends, "stuff in disposable crust" is a novel thing.
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Dec 23, 2019 06:07
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Internet Wizard posted:This has worked out great for me but poorly for my fiancé Are you engaged to a vampire?
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Dec 23, 2019 06:44
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Pie chat reminds me to ask: has anyone used any of the vegetable-based suets in their pie crust or steamed puddings? I'd never run across it until recently, but I bought a pound to try and was wondering what to expect in how it handles and how the final result turns out.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:48
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MORE TAXES WHEN posted:It also doesn't do the thing at the end where it says "being baked, fill it up with clarified butter", which I assume was in order to help it keep? That's what the funnel on top was used for. There's a recipe of The Good Housewife's Jewel for "stuff you pour into pies" as well, so I assume dumping liquid into baked pies was a somewhat common practice. twoday might have more insight on that. Not bad! I would try it. Did you include the spices as directed?  I guess clarified butter wouldn't spoil as fast, but it doesn't really work as a preservative. And this pie has a very fixed size (which is small) so I imagine it would be eaten quickly. To be honest, my guess would be that the butter would act to dilute some of the nastier fish flavor that came from the fish grease, because keep in mind that this fish was probably being transported slowly without refrigeration and then lying around for a while. Or maybe they just liked butter? quote:To be honest you could get...a very similar thing with parchment paper/foil with a lot less overhead. Yeah, there you go. The piecrusts often served as cooking utensils or storage containers, and one of the reasons they are less popular now is that we have cheaper and easier things that accomplish that. But still, it's cool to know that you can just MacGuyver yourself a Dutch oven or a roasting pan out of fat and flour whenever you need. This reminds me of this recipe: http://medievalcookery.com/recipes/chickenpasty.html quote:
My first thought when reading this was, "wow, I could eat a chicken leg with a layer of bread around it, that sounds great!" But I think the thin layer of dough would probably harden pretty quickly, and maybe burn before the chicken is fully cooked. But on the other hand, the dough works like aluminum foil and traps in heat, so maybe it cooks it faster?  Chickens back then were probably a lot smaller and had less meat too, and they tell you to cut the chicken in half as well, so that would also affect cooking time. It also depends on whether you use leavened or unleavened dough...If someone feels like trying it, be sure to post about it. (Ignore the modern recipe at the top at the page, read the real ones in the footnotes.) twoday fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Dec 24, 2019 |
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Dec 24, 2019 01:29
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The modern take on that is called coulet au pain and uses puff pastry: Just wrap that sucker in there with spices, brush with egg wash and cook until the pastry's golden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyaxDWLe6A4&t=760s (Timestamped.)
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Dec 24, 2019 08:22
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people in my state literally eat Lutefisk as a point of pride there's so much Luetefisk made in my state that it's literally exported around the world. The only other place in the entire world that eats the stuff imports it from us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk
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