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Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

rarecooking.wordpress.com

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Re: Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

#41
post #40

My grandmother had a cookbook from the 1920s and she claimed she had to update all the recipes to account for increased egg size. From the first recipe it doesn't look like that's the case here.

Some recipes are more sensitive than others. Also, they seem to just be feeling their way through with no real way to compare their results with the originals.

Re: Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

#42
post #8

I am not much of a cook but everytime I cook, recipes never work. Sometimes, it seems like that if you follow the receipes measurements exactly, your food almost never tastes like what you expect. There always needs a bit of human discretion. As such, I find video recipes to be far more effective. You can see them cook and get a feel of what "cook meat until brown" really means, or what is a "sprinkle of green onion"

I've found that part of the problem is that there's a very bad user experience with recipe formats. They assume that one will get all ingredients out first and will only start to follow the instructions once everything is ready. Almost no one does that all of the time. The back and forth reading that you have to do results in errors because you lose your place, skip a step, add an ingredient in the wrong order, etc.…

One thing that your recipe format helps with is timing, which is one of the things that I always found fun about cooking. Which is, how to have everything work to come out about the same time. So how do you prep and cook, and work in a special detail at the same time.

Do you have plans to incorporate full meals on the site, such as a meat dish with two sides and how to cook them all together, to come out at the same time?

Re: Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

#43

Boy, that beef roll looks great. I definitely need to give that one a try. These kinds of historical recipes are always fascinating to me. Some survive and are still quite good - my girlfriend made a middle eastern dish that apparently hasn't changed in a long, long time (shakshouka) and it turned out surprisingly complex and wonderful.

I actually just cooked shaksouka tonight. It's interesting to note that tomatoes are natively American and didn't even make it to the middle east until the late 1700s.

>tomatoes are natively American

So are chillies (chili peppers). Yes, Shakshouka is good.

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