I'm confused.
On the linked site, it's tagged as gender, feminism and cookbook.. the Sifter itself has no recipes at all? Is that some kind of trolling?
A Database of Historical Cookbooks
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Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#22One of my "if I ever become insanely rich I'm doing this" ideas is to have a culinary museum. Imagine exhibits of cooking utensils and traditions from around the world, with guest experts who can cook some of the items for you. So it becomes a walk/learn/sample kind of experience.
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#23From project's FAQ ( https://thesifter.org/Home/Faq ): Q: What is not in the Sifter? A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes. Seems to be a bit useless without it.
>A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes.
Seems to be a bit useless without it.
Yes, it's "useless" if one wants the The Sifter to be a source of recipes. Instead, the Sifter's goal appears to be a database of meta information[1] (e.g. ingredients, techniques, etc) of recipes and not the full text of recipes themselves.
An analogy might be a website of baseball statistics[2]. Yes, one can also complain that site is "useless" because it doesn't include videos of the actual games. But others can use it to see when black players first appeared, trends of batting averages, trends of pitcher rotations, etc. A researcher wouldn't need the actual films of gameplay to answer those types of questions and a database of meta info about baseball actually enables faster lookup.
[1] excerpt: >The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant,
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#24The more I try to cook, the deeper respect I have for historical cooks. The things that we have for granted now, like thermometers, stoves where one could set the level of heat were unavailable and cooking almost anything besides very simple dishes was quite hard.
If you cook a lot, you'll soon realize that cooking without all the technological advances is actually easier. After some time one develops an instinct of how things should be be (based on color, taste, size, even sound !). For example, if one wants too cook onions, choosing between butter and oil, checking the colour, checking if it's cooked or not, deciding to add some water at some point, or additional stuff to in…
I think he's talking about more basic technology. For example, cooking eggs in a non-stick pan is significantly easier, and even regular pans have uniform surfaces that heat evenly.
Things like silicone cooking tools, food professors, even just ovens where you can set a temperature are all miracle breakthroughs compared to how cooking was done in the past.
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#25The more I try to cook, the deeper respect I have for historical cooks. The things that we have for granted now, like thermometers, stoves where one could set the level of heat were unavailable and cooking almost anything besides very simple dishes was quite hard.
If you cook a lot, you'll soon realize that cooking without all the technological advances is actually easier. After some time one develops an instinct of how things should be be (based on color, taste, size, even sound !). For example, if one wants too cook onions, choosing between butter and oil, checking the colour, checking if it's cooked or not, deciding to add some water at some point, or additional stuff to in…
>> If you cook a lot, you'll soon realize that cooking without all the technological advances is actually easier.
Another thing it's important to realise is that a cooking recipe, unlike a computer program, is not a set of precise instructions that are necessary and sufficient to produce the same result always, but a template that can be modified at will. For the majority of cases you don't need to create precise chamical conditions to reproduce a certain dish with perfect accuracy -and that's just boring anyway.
Also, despite appearances, people who publish recipes (as books or websites, or what have you) are usually not trying to communicate with you how to cook a dish, because that is something you can easily find out for free (e.g. on wikipedia). Instead, they 're trying to, well, add value - by using an uncommon ingredient or revealing some "secret" of the dish, etc. So there's no reason to try and follow most recipes to the letter, because they're not really meant to be followed at all. The majority are only there to make you buy a book or click on some link etc.
For me the best way to cook is to know what you like to eat. The rest comes on its own. It takes some time and you have to start out with simple, boring stuff like boiling rice or frying eggs, but eventually you get to the point where you taste a dish once and you know what to do to cook it yourself. Without any need for a thermometer or a precision scales!
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you cook a lot, you'll soon realize that cooking without all the technological advances is actually easier. After some time one develops an instinct of how things should be be (based on color, taste, size, even sound !). For example, if one wants too cook onions, choosing between butter and oil, checking the colour, checking if it's cooked or not, deciding to add some water at some point, or additional stuff to in…
I think he's talking about more basic technology. For example, cooking eggs in a non-stick pan is significantly easier, and even regular pans have uniform surfaces that heat evenly. Things like silicone cooking tools, food professors, even just ovens where you can set a temperature are all miracle breakthroughs compared to how cooking was done in the past.
I remember both my grandmothers cooking and I don't remember either of them speaking about food processors or say pressure cookers in terms of "miracles". Both grew up and learned to cook at a time when such niceties where not available. I myself cook most of my food in simple pots and pans with simple utensils no different than what would have been available even a thousand years ago. Ovens are another matter- but even there, the variation between different modern ovens (e.g. how quickly they reach a certain temperature) means that experience with a particular oven is much more important than precision.
So I think "miracle breakthroughs" is an exaggeration. Those are things that are more "nice to have" than "absolutely indispensible".
If I wanted to admit to an exception- I've made mayonnaise by hand and by hand mixer. The former is a pain in the ass and takes a lot longer. Even so, having made it by hand I understand how the ingredients work together so I know what to do with the hand mixer. Which is not something you can know if you've always made it with a mixer. So you're actually losing something with too much technology in cooking, so I think anyway.
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#27As someone who works on a program that procedurally generates fictional cultures, including their culinary side, this is a godsend.
It allows me to inspect patterns and the evolution of cuisine over time. This will greatly enhance the accuracy and believeability of the generated cultures.
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#28As a person who doesn't cook very well, the value I find in most old cookbooks (and a surprising number of modern cookbooks) is just that: historical. And sometimes the sadness that no one makes certain dishes anymore. But I can't for the life of me figure something like "Stew until ready. Not long before it's ready add finely chopped garlic" [1] or "Prepare the duck, stuff it and stew until done" [2] Give me times,…
>> Give me times, and temperatures, and sizes, and weights!
The thing is, it's pointless to give such precise instructions because they will only ever work for one time and one time only, the time the recipe was (presumably) tested. After that, everything you do as you carry out the instructions in the recipe with absolute precision, like a little robot chef, will still produce a different result not least because your ingredients are no longer the ingredients used in the original recipe.
So for example, if someone tells you to stew a pound of beef "until ready"- the imprecision matches reality. Your pound of beef will not be the same as the pound of beef of the chef who wrote the recipe. It won't be the same as my pound of beef. It won't be the same as anyone else's pound of beef. And it won't be ready in the same exact time as everyone else's pound of beef. Not even if we're all eating from the same, very large, animal.
Like I say in another comment, a recipe is not a precise set of instructions that leads to a reproducible result, like a computer program or an algorithm. It's a template, a mnemonic, an informal description of how to achieve a result in the ballpark of a certain target.
I think this is one reason why many people have trouble with cooking, even when they're very good at following instructions: because they treat recipes as instructions to be followed, rather than a discussion, a debate if you like, between two cooks, or a source of inspiration.
Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks
#29The more I try to cook, the deeper respect I have for historical cooks. The things that we have for granted now, like thermometers, stoves where one could set the level of heat were unavailable and cooking almost anything besides very simple dishes was quite hard.
On a smaller timescale this has happened over the last 4-6 decades as well. My parents and grandparents didn't learn to cook with an instant read thermometer, digital scale, microwave, instant pot, sous vide machine, etc. I am not a talented cook but I am decent at RTFM and taking measurements so I can make decent meals some times. It makes cooking in a consistent way very easy compared to the learning curves they would had to have gone through.