Oven Thermometers: Taking the Hazards and Heartaches Out of Baking

When baking, many cooks a hundred years ago used a variety of informal ways to figure out whether an oven was very hot, hot, or less hot. However, times were changing and recipes were beginning to indicate the temperature that should be used. This was confusing to some cooks. The April, 1924 issue of Ladies Home Journal advocated for the use of oven thermometers. Here’s a few excepts:

Taking the Hazards and Heartaches Out of Baking: Oven Thermometers Save You Time and Money

Commercial bakers have been using temperature methods these many years in order to produce uniform baking results, while the majority of women who do their own baking still depend upon the hit-or-miss way of oven regulation. The housewife who has used the same range for a long period of time usually judges fairly well, but the inexperienced cook is completely at a loss when she is told to thrust her hand in the oven and count ten, or given some other antiquated method of judging heat.

No longer need women employ such indefiniteness for there are on the market at the present time small portable oven thermometers, reasonably durable in construction, which make guess work in baking a thing of the past, and put the home kitchen on a par with the scientifically correct bakeries of commercial use.

One can depend on the results every time. There is no chance for burnt or underdone food, once you have learned the control of your oven by temperature. This means a real saving in money because food is not wasted. There’s an added saving, too, for one never need worry about results.

Temperature can play a large part in accomplishing perfection in cake baking. A dependable recipe and painstaking mixing are essential, but more cakes are spoiled in the baking than in any other way. This because, by the ordinary method, there has been no way of being absolutely sure that your baking oven today was just like it was yesterday. Luck, good or bad, is a nonessential factor in cake baking if the temperature method outlined is adopted. It becomes an accurate science in which the terrors of possible failure have no place. Different types of cake batter require baking at different temperatures, but the size and depth of the pan also have their effect.