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A Database of Historical Cookbooks

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Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#31

Post by JacobDotVI »

antupis wrote: post #18
dutchmartin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great idea to start a museum (exhibition) with. You could make a 50’s restaurant with various food offerings that were popular then.

Or restaurant which copies very precisely some famous historical restaurant menu.

You might be interested in the restaurant Next in Chicago. From the Wikipedia:

>Rather than stick with one type of cuisine, Next completely changes its style every few months, focusing on a different time period, parts of the world, or various abstract themes for each "season" of its menu.

Next's very first menu was "Paris 1906" which was based on Escoffier's dishes from that year.

https://chicago.eater.com/2011/4/4/6688919/next-restaurants-...

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#32

Post by macinjosh »

wiz21c wrote: post #19
galkk wrote: post #5

The 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 agree that, once you figure it out, the sense based instincts is an easier way to cook. I would argue though, that modern cooking tools make learning those instincts much easier because you can use the tools to fly by instruments, so to speak, so you can get a feel for what looks, smells, sounds, and feels right.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#33

Post by _jal »

dinamic wrote: post #11

From 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.

> Seems to be a bit useless without it.

...In the same way a dictionary is useless if you want a novel.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#34

Post by airkumar »

This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in Asia/Africa.

The fact that these western recipes/techniques are more well-documented than eastern techniques is one factor in why western cuisine has historically received a lot more attention in restaurants/cooking schools as well as popular media (we'll set aside colonial biases, etc for now.)

As we use structured data to draw inferences and then guide actions more and more (ML -> AI...) the fact that databases like this skew entirely western will lead to distorted suggestions in applications that, say, aim to generate cooking curricula programmatically to teach cooking (I'm sure y'all can think of better examples than that.)

I wonder if voice technology can help capture oral histories, oral traditions, and allow those to be structured in a way that only written traditions have been in the recent past. There is hope! We'll all be better for it, too, when we can access the histories and traditions (many of which have been lost, or almost lost, at this point) of the whole world, not just a small section of it.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#36

Post by airkumar »

bovermyer wrote: post #27

As 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.

Very cool that you are generating fictional cultures! This resource only structures Western food cultures (probably because a lot of ancient Eastern & African histories relied on oral traditions rather than written, which has been harder to capture and structure pre-voice tech.) As a result, the patterns you detect and stories you generate will be limited to those Western sources; maybe that could be interesting, but I imagine combining those with other traditions around the world would lead to far more novel fictions.

Have you been able to find good structured data about Asian/African food? If not, it would be cool to figure out a way to start building that sort of database so that your stories draw from a fuller set of information and traditions! I think voice tech and the improvement in transcriptions + gpt3-like tools will help us start capturing and structuring oral histories much more effectively and quickly than ever before.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#37

Post by bovermyer »

airkumar wrote: post #36
bovermyer wrote: post #27

As 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.

Very cool that you are generating fictional cultures! This resource only structures Western food cultures (probably because a lot of ancient Eastern & African histories relied on oral traditions rather than written, which has been harder to capture and structure pre-voice tech.) As a result, the patterns you detect and stories you generate will be limited to those Western sources; maybe that could be interesting, but…

Getting data on non-Western cultural traits and patterns has been a challenge. I've had to rely primarily on anecdotes and articles found online.

Food history is a relatively recent study, so texts are hard to come by.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#38

Post by dmitriid »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #28
dmitriid wrote: post #13

As 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 yo…

> 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.

Which is provably false for the vast majority of recipes. And you need a starting point for a recipe. You can't "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire, and cook them" if you don't know the quantities, or the temperature, or what to look for in a finished product.

> 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

The reason people have trouble cooking is because people are not born with an innate ability to cook. And on the contrary I think many more people cook now precisely because the recipes are not vague incantations of ingredients.

Music and painting are not precise either. And yet, you don't expect anyone to become a master improviser from day one.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#39

Post by Finnucane »

airkumar wrote: post #34

This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in Asia/Africa. The fact that these western recipes/techniques are more well-documented than eastern techniques is one factor in why western cuisine has historically received a lot more attention in restaurants/cooking schools as well as popular media (we'll set…

The bulk of the Schlesinger collection was donated by Julia Child from her personal library, and yes, English-language cookbooks covering Asian and and especially African cuisine were scarce before 1940. And Child was definitely a Francophile when it came to food, so her collection was skewed that way.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#40

Post by Jtsummers »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #26
schwartzworld wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> So you're actually losing something with too much technology in cooking, so I think anyway.

Somewhat OT:

You're talking about cooking, but the same is true for many other activities and systems. Our technology level permits us to ignore many details and so we fail to learn the underlying mechanisms, processes, etc. In cooking: learning details of the cooking process, why you can make it with a hand or stand mixer versus by hand and what settings are appropriate in those cases. In driving: automatic transmissions hide the details of the different gears, so people driving in mountains and certain other conditions for the first time don't understand why they'd use a lower gear, whereas someone driving a manual transmission all the time would understand more easily.

Examples can be found from any field, but they all demonstrate a common theme: Sometimes you have to do things by hand to understand what's happening before you can apply the higher technology tooling effectively.

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