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A Database of Historical Cookbooks

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Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#41

Post by Wistar »

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.

Although, depending on the era, sourcing all the identical ingredients may be impossible, or nearly so, due to "culinary extinction."

Lenore Newman's recent book, "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food," explores the foods lost to the world.

In late 2019, the Gastropod podcast ran an episode with Newman and the "Ghost Foods."

https://gastropod.com/of-ghost-foods-and-culinary-extinction...

Also, it has become very hard to find things such as true buttermilk or real heavy cream that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized, etc.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#42

Post by kritiko »

kanobo wrote: post #2

I'm personally interested in what old fast food and junk food used to taste like, for example the recipe to the original Coke drink: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-recipe . I wish I could go back and taste a 50's In-N-Out meal.

I recommend Paul Freedman's Ten Restaurants That Changed America. The section on Howard Johnson's is very interesting.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#43

Post by fermienrico »

jasode wrote: post #23
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.

>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…

Hmm... how many people go oh let me check what the stats are for black pepper in 18th century?

Baseball metrics have value on its own to a vast number of people. Cookbook metadata has little value to most people beyond the academic researchers.

This is a poor analogy, no offense.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#44

Post by fermienrico »

_jal wrote: post #33
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.

No, dictionary adds value for most users, billions of people. When you come across a word you don't know the meaning of, you can look it up.

Cookbook metadata DB provides value to a vanishingly small % of the people - primarily academic researchers.

I am not saying that this whole enterprise is useless, I am saying that your analogy doesn't hold up.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#45

Post by gavindean90 »

fermienrico wrote: post #43
jasode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Hmm... how many people go oh let me check what the stats are for black pepper in 18th century? Baseball metrics have value on its own to a vast number of people. Cookbook metadata has little value to most people beyond the academic researchers. This is a poor analogy, no offense.

Food has a value on its own to a vast number of people. I would argue there are far more cooks than baseball fans.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#46

Post by wiz21c »

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…

>>> I've made mayonnaise by hand and by hand mixer.

Strongly disagree !!! :-) Although I'm a pretty good cook, I fail the mayonnaise 9 times out of 10. So my wife does it. And I can assure you she does that in a short and super quiet way, all by hand. Just softness. It's been like that for years and I'm stall amazed.

Oh and when she bakes, I have a lot of pride in mixing everything by hand : Chantilly, egg yolks and sugar, anything and butter, etc. The harder the better. Dunno why I like to do that. I guess it's a kind of micro sport :-)

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#47

Post by AlotOfReading »

dmitriid wrote: post #38
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 quantitie…

Another thing to consider is that prior to the late 19th/20th centuries, standardization of ingredients and quantities was not really a thing. Flour came in different densities and gluten contents, depending on what the mill felt like producing. Tomatoes came in different sizes and acidities depending on the soil and weather, and neither stoves nor ovens had effective temperature control. If they had told you to use 50g of something, that wouldn't have meant 50g of whatever the reader had, and it certainly wouldn't mean 50g of what you can get.

Instead, the reader is expected to "fill in the gaps", a much more reasonable expectation when everyone is cooking daily with the same few dozen ingredients because long term preservation isn't a thing yet outside pickling/curing/fermentation.

Re: A Database of Historical Cookbooks

#48

Post by codyb »

fermienrico wrote: post #43
jasode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Hmm... how many people go oh let me check what the stats are for black pepper in 18th century? Baseball metrics have value on its own to a vast number of people. Cookbook metadata has little value to most people beyond the academic researchers. This is a poor analogy, no offense.

I was just thinking the other day that’d it’d be interesting to be able to see what ingredients are used with eachother most often.

Say for instance, you bought ground cumin for some recipe, and now you have a bunch left and dunno what to add it to.

You could try randomly adding it or a database like this might give you some pretty interesting results.

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