To Make Sassages | Hacker News Reader

To Make Sassages

rarecooking.com

54 pointshoffmannesque23 comments

I love these old recipes. Sometimes the flavors are delightful and unexpected; other times they are just unexpected. Always, they're a reminder that the past was far less familiar than we usually imagine. That's an especially good reminder to me, as an instinctive conservative, that the past was not the ideal time I often imagine it to have been.

The spelling in old written text, makes me think of the way the Canterbury Tales is comprehensible, but at the same time feels like I'm reading something foreign.

Also love how, even 300 years ago, people couldn't avoid leaving ambiguity in their recipes

"as much salt as you shall think fitt to season the meat"

Great... thanks, Miss Baumfylde

Go read larousse gastronomique sometime. Anything from the "meat" section is just hilarious. Phrases like "prepare the shank in the usual way" and "get a measure of beef" occur WAY too often.

Thank you! I've not heard of this.

My old snickerdoodle recipe tells me to roll the cookies into the size of a "small walnut."

I was watching "Ugly Delicious" the other day on Netflix and Mark Bittman acclaimed food writer said "I always write salt to taste." I think it's just one of those things that's the "art" side of cooking.

I'm sure you know this, but for anyone else... Bittman wrote the excellent "How to Cook Everything". It's a great go-to gift for college graduations.

Obligatory mention of the "18th Century Cooking" YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw

The Mushroom Ketchup recipe is one I repeatedly go back to -- it's just that good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u_FejNuks

I also encourage anyone who still has their elderly relatives with them to ask them for recipes they had from their era. My family keeps a common cookbook, and it's nice to be able to pull out Grandma's shrimp-dip recipe for special occasions.

For those who want to go further back in time the Getty Museum published an Apicius edition: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0892363940

I got a copy of Apicius several years ago. For reasons which now escape me, my mother and i decided to cook from it for our christmas dinner. That was a memorable meal.

Well... at least the Detect Zero-Width Character add-on is working. https://imgur.com/a/OprrD

* roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-chrome-extension || https://github.com/roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-...

Yes I saw that too and we posted in the same minute! :-)

Yeah, but if you're not first, you're last. Ha.

Interesting it uses lean pork leg and beef fat over lard. 300 years ago the pig breeds were often fattier so there was a lot of lard around and was the easy choice - it's an optimisation the cook has made or learned to use beef fat.

I've bought a lot of old cookbooks - there is so much basic knowledge that's been lost as industrial automation took over the food industry.

Sausage packaging does all it can in 2018 to affirm it contains 96% or 98% pork.

Is it mindblowing how readable the recipe is despite it being 311 years old. Turns out we knew what beef suet was back then!

Why does the recipe contain zero length characters? Like described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754987

Screenshot taken with addon: https://i.imgur.com/rgG0tMb.png Screenshot taken without addon: https://i.imgur.com/BV3sxqP.png

The zero length character is also at the end of the title in this hacker news entry.

I think the recipe was copy/pasted from a transcription project, possibly this one: http://transcribe.folger.edu/

The zero width characters might be leftovers from the transcription process, marking disagreements or known spelling errors or something.

If you click into one of the books on that website, you can see options to mark stuff as "ex" or "unc", which explains the weird markup (<span class="ex">er</span>).

There's some odd markup:

> <div>you cant p<span class="ex">er</span>seve the suet from the meat</div>

It's also around a possible spelling error"? (preserve vs perseve)

The markup flags up abbreviations. I'm not quite clear on the distinctions between the different tags but it looks like "ex" is for expansions/excluded letters and "sl" is something to do with superscript letters, or thereabouts.

See here for more on early modern "secretary hand" abbreviations: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/conventions.html#co...

I think “perseve” == perceive.

What addon is that? I'm curious to see if other websites are doing that to me now.

EDIT: my bad, I assumed the earlier hn link there was about the discussion on fingerprinting with them.

Right now there is 'only' a chrome extension that I know of that just scans for zero-length-characters: https://github.com/chpmrc/zero-width-chrome-extension

For Firefox there is this extension that does search and replace based on regex (so you need to create the rule by yourself). https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxreplace/?src=...

Apply an autoload rule with these settings:

  Name: zero length replacement
  HTML: Output only
  URL: <entering no url matches all sites>
  Replace: (\uFEFF|\u200B|\u200C)
  Type: Regular expression
  With: <span style="background-color:#F00 !important">&#x1f633;</span>

Could it be to prevent copy paste? Or perhaps it was copy pasted from somewhere else with those as copy protection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com

To Make Sassages​

To Make Sassages