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Comment by rlonstein | Hacker News Reader

Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.

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I think one thing that was implied was that the reader already knows how to cook. Since none of the measurements were standard (even things that have measurements - 3 cups of flour measured by weight can vary significantly from person to person) it was understood that whoever is making the recipe knows what a dough should look like, or what a batter's viscosity should be, and make the proper adjustments according to their own needs.

Counterpoint - I think a lot of people (STEM especially) get hung up on precision in cooking. Baking - yes, its chemistry and precision matters.

But cooking? You very well may need varying ratios of ingredients, to taste, depending on size/freshness/variety of the produce you are using in a recipe. Or simply your mood.

Whatever tomatoes grandma was putting into a marinara 50-100 years ago are nothing like the varieties you are going to find at the grocery, farmers market or your garden today anyway.

My grandmother's index cards are nearly all for baked goods, and they're all useless. It'll call for "a small pile of soda" or "eggs" (no number, just "eggs"). The cookie recipe I loved growing up turns out to list no quantities at all EXCEPT ... "2 eggs OR add more flour" which ... makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe she was trolling us?

If you want to understand baking chocolate chip cookies and the result of varying ratios of ingredients there are a few guides like this-

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/packages/baking-guide/co...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jesseszewczyk/buzzfeed-foods-best-c...

I hate baking because precision isn’t sufficient to make the quality of food my mom makes, who has tens of thousands of hours of experience. She bakes by look, feel, smell, and even though I wrote down very specific instructions, I can hardly get my product to match up.

Baking is about precision but it’s not just limited to the recipe. The recipe may need to be adjusted based on temperature, humidity, cooking appliance, altitude (if you live in different locations.) Heck, ingredients like flour are not necessarily standardized across brands or region.

Tasting/feeling as you go and adjusting is probably one of the most important bits of cooking or baking.

Yes… It’s even crazier with bread baking. While cakes and cookies are generally the same everywhere with the exception of high altitude baking, bread baking is some of the trickiest skills to master.

For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.

And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.

We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).

Precision in baking is overrated unless you're a factory.

Every loaf of bread I bake probably tastes slightly different, and that's just fine according to the people eating it. If I'm baking a cake, or cookies and at the last minute, I discover that I'm out of something important, I just figure out a substitute and it turns out (usually!) just fine.

Far more important than precision is understanding how various ingredients will react with each other and compensating.

At some point, you just try to make it with whatever you think "a handful" is and measure when you do.

If you fail, you note and adjust.

After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.

Cooking isn't baking. Recipes with a mix of languages are usually better. Those units are fine for home use. Recipes, as algorithms/programs, are meant to be run, and iterated on. If you do make them, you can also weigh out all the ingredients in grams for future cooks if you want more exactness, discarding volumes and multiple units.

Yes and a lot of things like stews, sauces, soups, etc you can lump together as "peasant food" that had variations in how you prepared it based on what you had left over.

The idea of combing through dozens of recipes, formulating a precise grocery list, and shopping with the intent to cook that one exact dish is very much a Type-A modern day phenomenon.

How many tomatoes go into the sauce? However many bruised ugly tomatoes grandma had leftover. How much meat to make it a meat sauce? Whatever leftover cuts from the roast. Etc.

Improvisational cooking was much more the norm. It is also how you avoid food waste.

Worse yet, some aspects of old recipes have objectively changed over time. Eggs are bigger. Staples like salt and flour is more homogenous. Our cookware is also different. Much of the stuff we get away with today on non-stick cookware required much more skill and attention in the past.

Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.

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