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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...
That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.
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.
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.
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
Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.
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.
Where oh where on God's green earth did they survive and can I get them shipped!?
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-order...
$17 for a single fruit!
(Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTswXAFA18Y )
$10 in 2003 when the show first aired is $17.61 using the CPI to calculate inflation.
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.
Does anyone know of a similar site with melons?
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.
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.
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:
Do tell -- what's it called? Sounds like a great read.
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.
I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).
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.
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?”.
This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
> 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.
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.
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
I only recently found out that in some places in the US,
they cut them in fours
See also, milk bags.
Our butter isn't wrapped in foil, each stick is wrapped in wax paper and the whole thing is boxed in thin cardboard.
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.
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...
It's much easier finding unsalted butter in the US than in Portugal.
In fact, unsalted butter has been the default everywhere I've lived in the US.
Edit: not to mention, say, salted butter being a point of pride for Britany.
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.
I've typically (only?) seen it on savory recipes though. For cakes and cookies you'd have quantities in grams.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml.
How so?
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.
Also reminds me of a coworker in a restaurant in Palo Alto who, when I asked him the recipe for a dressing I needed to make, told me "ginger juice, lemon, and just make it good". It turns out there were a few other ingredients.
No "cups" in old British recipes I've made but there will be measures
you have to look up like a "gill".
https://oldbritishrecipes.com/collection-of-old-biscuit-reci...
And yeah, depending on how far back you're going or what sources you're using, there will be a lot of vaguely defined quantities. Glen of Glen and Friends on Youtube regularly cooks vintage recipes and gets into how things evolved over time. Most of his old cookbooks are either Canadian or American but from time to time he cooks from UK cookbooks.
Most of the instances of "cups" come from the "Edwardian recipes" which is a collection of international recipes including American. It includes in the preface a Table of Measures which is what you do for Brits who see "cup" and ask "what the fuck is that?"!
4 cups flour = 1 quart or 1 lb.
2 cups of butter (solid) = 1 lb.
2¹⁄₂ cups powdered sugar = 1 lb.
1 cup = ¹⁄₂ pint
1 glass = ¹⁄₂ pint
1 pint milk or water = 1 lb.
9 large eggs = 1 lb.
1 table-spoon butter = 1 oz.
1 heaping table-spoon butter = 2 ozs.
Butter the size of an egg = 2 ozs.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68137/68137-h/68137-h.htm#Li...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjIwI5Vdmds
British recipes today largely use metric units. Pre-metric recipes absolutely did use cups (although this persisted in Canada and the US more than the UK). As Glen points out none of these British cups were standardized.
Which is probably part of why British recipes never say cup.
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.
I disagree as British (or non-U.S.) recipes will use a combination of
metric and/or imperial sizes depending on their age.
any sane recipe will use something like "5 apricots".
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?
For reference a friend who'd expatriated to the midwest posted something about some giant apples they bought. I replied with a picture of an average apple I bought, roughly twice the size of theirs.
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?
Weighing things out is the correct method. What could be useful is if recipes provided the ratios of the ingredients along with error margins, so that you could easily type in an amount (e.g. 100g flour) and it'd scale the other ingredients to match. However, maybe that's overthinking it.
I do agree it doesn’t make sense for things that aren’t fluid-like.
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.
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!
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.
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.
- 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.
It’s a game changer and works so much better.
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.
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.
This story describes the dangers of NOT standardizing on a single, proper version.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
"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.
> 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 alien/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)
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?
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).
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.
That is such an entitled nerd attitude. "Someone else is inconvenienced by my obvious improvements, but clearly they are wrong."
Imagine if someone came by and "standardized" all your build scripting to use the same command line parser and all your CI recipes blew up. Yeah, it's like that. People have jobs to do, even if you don't think those jobs are important. And they've spent years (or likely decades in this particular case) doing their own process improvements and optimization work.
Stay in your lane, basically.
To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one. And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly.
"Stay in your lane" is not the way to address any flaws in what the OP did.
Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother.
OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christmas tree, but not something that will evoke those remembrances of being a five-year-old again.
Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.
It's an affront to tradition. And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread.
You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's a misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about What Family Cooking is For, socially.
It's a mixed bag, not a dummy barging in and ruining everything.
Well, right! Who gave the upthread commenter permission to rejigger all the recipes? Those are shared traditions, not something individuals are expected to "fix" without shared permission. That they don't happen to be stored in an authenticated and access-controlled medium isn't really part of the moral analysis.
> Your rude attitude is unwelcome.
Honestly I thought it was whimsy, not rudenss. I didn't expect highly paid tech professionals to be so thin-skinned about cooking, so that's on me. Apologies.
But at the same time, and for the same reason, refactoring your great grandparents' received wisdom is also rude, and that's the part here people have trouble with.
Fwiw about the "adding egg" to the mix
And don't forget to make a correction adjustment between your grandma generation and whatever text you would find.
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.
Are you saying your modified recipes taste worse? I think that would make most people upset...
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.)
I suspect she just forked from the last known good commit without telling them.
Would you consider tackling some Kipling, next?
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.
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.
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.
I spent a whole afternoon researching how much almonds you could by in 1952 post-war west germany for 50 pfennig.
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.