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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

While I respect the idea of seeing what we used to make, and how, from my experience old recipes belong as a relic.

Many old recipes use wildly imprecise measuresments, ingredients or tools that no longer even exist, and frankly...are bland.

We have access today to so many more ingredients than in the past, and most modern recipes are much more flavorful as a result.

I think we really take for granted the globalisation of foods and spices.

Editing based on a reply:

This is also survivorship bias. Basically, any old recipe worth keeping is still being printed and/or improved upon in today's recipes.

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In a beautiful thread on Twitter, one of the participants related how her grandmother’s recipes only made sense once she talked with the her grandmother about her measurements. A cup? That was the blue cup she kept over there. A tablespoon? Why, that’s this one. A handful? Here ya go, honey. It’s not that those measurements are “wildly imprecise,“ necessarily, it’s that they are quite particular to the cook.

Even if sizes and techniques were standardized, ingredients (and appliances!) weren't. The flour you got was the stuff the local mill made, the vegetables were whatever variety was in season, and the meat was what you could afford or had left over. The older books relied on the cook to adapt them for the peculiarities of their kitchen to achieve a result they were already familiar with.

Standardization only became a widespread thing in the early to mid 20th century. That's about when you start seeing cookbooks increasingly specifying precise quantities of known ingredients and sometimes tailoring to cooks who might not be familiar with the end result.

Much more flavorful? In what way? This strikes me as a really naive perspective on cooking. Also, FYI, “globalization of foods and spices” has been going on since the early days of the Silk Road.

I'm basing it on personal experience, with grandparents and further back recipes.

I don't think something like avocados even existed here, or any type of spicy pepper.

I'm a spicehead, and nothing has any at all. Or much say, umami. Meat and potatoes. Meat and green beans. Add salt or bland spice, if you're lucky. It's basically all I ate growing up.

Today I can buy Nashville hot spice in a can, for example.

I'm sure you can find examples of some things existing in some places. But the silk road didn't run through rural midwest.

Edit to add: Speaking of avocados, and complex favors...imagine a perfect guacamole. With avocados, and spicy peppers, garlic, onion, etc. Does a recipe exist for such a thing before say, 1960?

In regards to your edit, avocados and chili peppers both originate in Mexico. Guacamole was a native dish so it's been around for centuries, but the modern version with onions and cilantro couldn't have existed until the Spanish brought those ingredients to Mexico

Excellent points, but at what time would all of that been written in English and American measurements for American consumers, with ingredients available? I only guessed 1960s, but it very well could have been decades later.

Who makes guacamole with an exact recipe? You don’t need precise measurements for a recipe like that, and if you do you’re doing it wrong.

>In what way?

Not the grandparent, but food in the Anglosphere 70 years ago predominantly consisted of "eat to live" meals such as meat and three veg (with way too much salt).

It wasn't until the post-war migration boom when more interesting flavours (Greek, Italian, Indian, Carribean, South American etc.) started appearing on our general palettes.

That said, there are definitely exceptions to the "bland" rule, such as some fantastic old-school British sausages, smoked/cured meats and cheeses.

A good cut of meat and fresh veggies all cooked appropriately and hit with kosher/sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, quality olive oil, and quality white wine vinegar/lemon juice can still be a wildly delicious meal. At a certain point, it’s less about lack of ingredients than lack of technique.

>A good cut of meat and fresh veggies all cooked appropriately and hit with kosher/sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, quality olive oil, and quality white wine vinegar/lemon juice can still be a wildly delicious meal

I'm not sure if you grew up in an Anglicised culture, but "meat and 3 veg" is almost always boiled.

Some old recipes are really good, like shepherds pie. Maybe that’s why it stuck around though.

Ah. That's something I didn't mention that I should have. Survivorship Bias. So, you can still find recipes for a good shepherd's pie today, so I wasn't thinking of such things in my comment.

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