Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen | Hacker News Reader

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

rarecooking.wordpress.com

128 pointsbenbreen41 comments

The cutoff at 1800 seems odd given Louis Eustace Ude's _The French Cook_ comes out in French in 1813, and had a strong foothold in England prior to 1800. [1] If I understand correctly, he was also one of the first to bring what we now consider modern gastronomic techniques into British cooking. He may present an interesting case study for the period before Grimod and Brillat-Savarin.

http://www.cooksinfo.com/louis-eustache-ude

There is a group in San Francisco called the Guild of Cookery[1] that is doing this with old recipes and running pop-up dinners based on Game of Thrones feasts. I went to one and it was fascinating to hear them talk about finding old recipes and sourcing ingredients as authentic as they could get. Interesting stuff.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/guildofcookery - sorry, they only have Facebook

I imagine people who are interested in this would also be interested in the Silk Road Gourmet: www.silkroadgourmet.com. Everything from Babylonian recipes to reconstructions of Roman fish sauce.

If you like deciphering ancient recipes, you may interested in "The Forme of Cury: A Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled, about A.D. 1390": http://www.amazon.com/The-Forme-Cury-Ancient-Compiled/dp/142...

It's remarkable that English written over six centuries ago is still more or less comprehensible, albeit with a little effort.

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.

Heston Blumenthal's London restaurant Dinner by Heston[1] has a similar theme, with British recipes from the 14th to 20th century. The only restaurant I've been to where the menu had a bibliography

[1] http://www.dinnerbyheston.com

And if you are into that, his cookbook Historical Heston contains a lot of the recipes and background for some of the items at Dinner. Eventually picked it up just for the tipsy cake recipe...

It's frustrating how much they alter the recipes. Do it like the funny text says!

Yup. The fish custard may have actually turned out had they followed the recipe. And there are fish-custard-y recipes from other cultures that turn out and taste great...

Wow, mac & cheese has been around longer than I realized -

http://rarecooking.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/maccarony-cheese...

Of the recipes that I read, cherry brandy is the easiest by far — you macerate several pitted cherries in a jar for several days — and not alien at all to a contemporary reader with an interest in these things. But should it have been quite so easy? 'Brandy' is almost as general a term as 'wine' or 'beer'. Which brandy available to an American in 2014 would be most comparable to the brandy available to an English cook in 1601, I wonder?

The SCA do a lot of this sort of thing, so if you're interested, then the links at http://www.medievalcuisine.com/favorites/cookery-pages-by-pe... might be to your liking.

I liked this, I have some of the 1500s or so recipes from when I have been inspired watching historical cooking documentaries, but the problem for me has been figuring out how to translate them properly to modern ingredients.

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.

@rare_cooking, here. Thanks for checking our our project. Let us know if you try any of our recipes (as we cooked them or otherwise) and how it turns out.

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"

For a lot of ingredients it's simply not going to be possible to follow exactly. For instance, suppose it calls for "1 jalapeno, chopped" - jalapenos will vary greatly in size and heat. Other ingredients will lose potency over time, so who knows how yours compare to theirs.

Another problem is that many recipes use the wrong metric for ingredients in the first place - most things should be done by weight, not volume.

But yes, in terms of cooking (as opposed to baking) one should never expect to follow a recipe exactly, no matter what. Everything should be tasted and modified to adjust along the way. Eventually one gets a sense of what those phrases really mean, particularly if you see the same person's recipes repeatedly.

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. That really impacts the results. In this vein, I've been working on a format that lets you just go top to bottom with much better results. Would love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.makebetterfood.com/recipes/

Your format is most certainly NOT for me. I am one of those people that do get all ingredients out first. I also get all my required measuring instruments out ahead of time. I also read the entire recipe so I can plan my steps. A normal recipe format is ideal for me. Your format is confusing to me. But everyone does things differently. I'm sure your format has an audience. Good luck.

In fact, it is much better to do what you describe. My cooking life became much easier once I learned to get a proper mise-en-place going. By the time I actually turn on a burner or anything like that, everything is fully prepped and ready to go in a pre-measured container.

How can you do a mise for, e.g., one-off home baking? In the case of familiar recipes I find it easier and cleaner to use a JIT process...

I don't bake, I only cook so your specific example I don't know.

I'll also admit that when I'm dialing something in ("needs more X") that obviously that's not prepped ahead of time.

Anything else I find it easier and cleaner to just have a bowl of X ready to go. It goes in the dishwasher within minutes of using it, and my cutting board and such was already cleaned.

I like your format very much, and it's close to how I usually transcribe recipes if transcription is necessary... poking around through the "wall of ingredients" of an unfamiliar recipe is extremely time-consuming and a great source of errors. Worst of all are the recipes that specify total quantity of an ingredient, but only in the detail advise to reserve some of it to be used in two different steps.

There's a fairly well established alternate format (active format) for recipes that addresses the concern you identify, which is pretty similar to your format but with the action for each step ahead of the steps ingredients; is also fairly common for standard format recipes to break into seperate pieces based on where separating prep makes sense.

I'm think of you aren't breaking on natural prep separations but just on traditional recipe steps, then the action-first approach of the active format is superior (since awareness of the actions is essential to planning prep), but for people with less kitchen experience (or that want to spend less effort analyze the recipe before executing) the standard format--possibly with explicit prep separations--is the best way to go. Failing to prep before starting execution is a common source of failure, and while separating pero can work, doing prep one action at a time rarely works well.

You should take a look at Cooking for Engineers. They've come up with an interesting diagram shorthand for recipes that, while rather reductionist, provides a nice quick reference when you're in the thick of things.

An example: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/200/Osso-Buco

That's hilarious! As soon as I saw that diagram, I knew how to read it. I write recipes I copy off the internet onto paper in a similar format. List of ingredients, along with a word or two about what to do with them, draw a line next to the whole grouping and an arrow into the next step where that result is used.

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?

It really is a skill & a set of knowledge. You can't expect to be good without practice (sometimes lots of practice).

At the beginning it is things like mistaking whipping cream for heavy cream, not knowing what "browned" looks like, or other "rookie" mistakes that basically translate to "not actually following the recipe".

As you get more ambitious, you start to tackle things like baking that require an intuition for how much to knead, how sticky is too sticky, etc.

Or you start to try recipes that run many things in parallel. Last time I made chicken sauteed in butter, each step was easy enough, but suddenly they have to be done in parallel and the sauce has to be done before the chicken and the potatoes need to be ready at the same time and everything has to happen fast... That was the moment I felt I really understood "cooking", when the timer for the sauce timer was beeping and the chicken was smoking and the potatoes were getting cold.

http://www.cookingforengineers.com

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/forums/index.php

I agree 100%. Check out the 4-Hour Chef if you get the chance. After going through that and practicing cooking I find that I am better at discerning information about recipes and cooking overall.

Recipes are to cooking as sheet music is to playing music. Just being able to read it is not really enough to know how it should sound.

"As such, I find video recipes to be far more effective."

My path to learning to cook was to watch nearly the entire run of Good Eats, picking out recipes that seemed like fun, but more focusing on using the knowledge and skills to do my own thing.

The host of Good Eats and I appear to have radically different tastes, so, ironically, whenever I've actually made one of Alton's recipes from the show that taught me how to cook, neither my wife or I have liked them. Perhaps some I simply messed up, but certainly not all of them. But with what I learned from that show I've become at least "decent". Couldn't cook in a restaurant or anything, but I can perform one of the higher skills of home cooking, "see what's left in the pantry -> make something from what you have -> get requests for the 'recipe'".

Agreed, he is teaching you the fundamentals, and how things interact on molecular levels on up and dissipates a lot of cargo culting, from a purely tv show perspective its a show that's worth watching.

Video recipes aren't really recipes, they're instructional guides. They instruct how to cook and provide lots of detail in a compressed form. A recipe is just the design parameters. You won't be able to write the app with just design parameters; you have to know how to program first.

Watching videos has been very helpful for me. My favorite is Chef John because he is informative and entertaining

http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/

The image presentation on the site is beautiful. Is that a native feature of wordpress?

It is indeed, you can pick from a number of image templates. They have single images, carousels, mosaics, grids among others off the top of my head.

Sort of. WordPress provides the gallery; the carousel comes from the Jetpack plugin [1] which is included on wordpress.com sites and can be installed [2] on self-hosted sites.

[1] http://jetpack.me/support/carousel/

[2] http://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

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