A Database of Historical Cookbooks

> I'm not trying to pick a fight but I'm genuinely curious to see how you would disprove my statement. Like, a formal (counter) proof etc.

You've proven it yourself:

> That's cooking- not baking, btw. Apparently that requires precision, but I don't really bake.

How is baking different from cooking that baking requires precision whereas cooking "does not"? It's the same process: raw ingredients are subjected to chemical and thermochemical reactions to achieve a result. Their recipes are in the same cookbooks. They have a significant overlap in ingredients.

Where do you draw a line?

Is Beef Wellington coking or baking? Or do you go by feeling? "Today I'm baking, so I'm going to do a precise beef Wellington recipe"?

What about Shepherd's Pie? Baking is defined as "to cook by dry heat especially in an oven" [1] Exactly what's being done to the shepherd's pie (as is done to any other pies). Precision or "it's not a proper way to use it, you have to wing it"?

Or mince pie? If you have meat in it, then "it's pointless to give such precise instructions", but if you remove meat, then "apparently that requires precision", is that how it works?

> And yes, to be honest, "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire and cook them" is how I cook all my meals. There are very few things I actually measure

I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bake

I'm sorry but what you provide above is not a proof. It's what passes for a "proof" in internet forums. At most it can give you some points in a reddit argument or similar pointless exchange (which I'm glad to note we're not having) but it's really not the same thing as a proof at all. Though I'm always hopeful that on HN users will be a bit more careful with the terminology. To clarify, when you said "proof" I expected a formal proof and I was curious to see if you had one in mind. And I was curious because it would have been very difficult to provide one, given that I didn't make any formal claims.

In any case, I don't even agree that my distinction between baking and cooking is so obviously wrong. If you search the internet for "baking" you will find pages upon pages of results with confectionary items, such as cookies, cakes, bread occasionally and so on- but not dishes like beef Wellignton or sheperd's pie, which are "baked" but not generally refered to as "bakes" or "baking" (not in UK English anyway- we might be disagreeing on the grounds of different interpretations of the same English words).

>> I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.

Actualy, no, on both counts. I never received "precise instructions" as a child. I sure didn't learn to cook from my parents- like the curse of lycanthropy, the ability to cook a decent meal skipped a generation in my family. I learned to cook by watching my grandmothers and by eating the food they cooked. "Watching" did not include taking careful note of the precise quantities of ingredients used in a dish, just noting that certain ingredients are used (without restrictions on what varieties of those ingredients can be used, or what other ingredients may also be used). Later I used my memory of how a certain dish tasted to reproduce it. Occasionally I helped my grandmothers cook so I had some hands-on experience with specific types of processing of ingredients, which I find is much more troublesome for beginner cooks than knowing precise quantities.

For example, I used to help one of my grandmothers make spanakopita, a Greek spinach pie with filo pastry. That was when I was very small, before I even went to school, so too small to know anything about quantities like kilos etc, let alone remember them now. So I would only really help in the part where the filo pastry leaves are laid out in a tray, handlng them gingerly to avoid ripping them, then oiled with olive oil using a cooking brush (an easy job for a careful and methodical child's hands). Equally, when I wanted to make spanakopita for the first time as an adult I'd just use the memory of eating my yiayia's spanakopita to decide how much to use of spinach, leek, fresh onions and feta -the main ingredients of the filling, again from memory. I never looked up exactly how much e.g. spinach to use- first of all, the spinach I get from the supermarket comes in bags of 1kg and it's obvious that my (yes) baking tray would not take, say, 10kg of spinach.

As to new recipes I've never had before, my strategy is to look up some information about the dish on wikipedia, which never gives precise anything when it comes to dishes, and then see whether I can do something like that at home. Occasionally, yes, I've looked up recipes- but I've never followed one. I look up a recipe to get a feel for relative quantities, not precise, absolute values. But most of the time I don't even do that and use the proportions of ingredients that I feel I'll like.

In general, like I say above, eyballing quantities is part and parcel of knowing how to cook. I'm finding that this is hard to reconcile with some peoples' experience, but this really is the way most people cook- and the way that most people have, traditionally, cooked.

Edit: for the sake of having a honest debate, I confess that there are recipes that I've looked up, specifically recipes for emulsions like bechamel sauce, mayonnaise or a Greek sauce called avgolemono. Those require some precision (though not absolute) because, well, they're emulsions. But those are about 1% of my cooking. If I summarised my approach the other 99% of the time it would be thus: I reverse-engineer the recipes of dishes I've tasted and approximate those of the ones I haven't.

A database of baseball stats includes game results, so you can tell which teams won, how they did in each particular inning, or against a particular pitcher on a particular day.

Not including recipes themselves is like showing all the individual stats for every player without giving any information about who won the games. There's value there, but it would be much more valuable if the full information was available - not just to the general public, but to researchers as well.

> I'm sorry but what you provide above is not a proof. It's what passes for a "proof" in internet forums.

The proof is empirical, and several-fold:

First, the existence of precise recipes that people use. They work.

Second, your own inability to even define what needs precision and what doesn't. "Meat pie isn't baking because most baking refers to cakes" is laughable at best. As is "well, yes, for sauces you need a more precise recipe, but it's emulsion". As if "emulsion" or "baking" (which you can't even properly define) is somehow different from the rest of cooking.

Third. The "cooking is art" argument doesn't preclude that you can become good at it on precise technique alone. It's not magic. "Until meat is ready" has had a precise temperature measurement Celsius/Fahrenheit for decades. Chemical reactions that cause caramelisation, make emulsions, cause ingredients to tenderise or dry out etc. have been know to decades, can be explained in simple terms, can be observed and measured with instruments that are very commonly available now etc.

But that aside, the most infuriating part of your "argument" is that it's the "draw the rest of the owl" [1] argument. Just because you know how to cook, and you don't use precise recipes, and you draw some ill-defined arbitrary lines between where precision is required and where it's not, this somehow invalidates the experiences and the needs of absolutely everybody else.

A recipe that's vague caters to the self-professed "cooking is art" snobs. A recipe that's precise can and will serve as a foundation for absolutely everyone, regardless of their proficiency with cooking.

This is the same, or was the same for many years in many other areas, by the way. From programming to cycling, from music to martial arts. "It has to come from the heart" has plagued many a hobby. Thankfully, in the age of information it's changing, and people no longer assume that "draw the rest of the owl" is a valid approach.

[1] https://external-preview.redd.it/DodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrP...