Oh dear, I’m never memorized most of these cooking facts that a hundred-year-old cookbook says I should commit to memory. I generally just look at a recipe rather than memorizing all sorts of relationships between various ingredients.
Hundred-Year-Old Cooking Facts to Commit to Memory
Unfamiliar as I am with cups and quarts, these’ll never get into my head!
I’m familiar with cups and quarts, but, similarly to you, they’ll never get into my head.
Perhaps in those days, folks didn’t have so many other things competing for space in their brains!
lol..like all these passwords etc.
🙂 Passwords are definitely cluttering my brain.
Maybe. . . It seems like people saw memorization of various things as being a more important skill years ago.
I don’t usually memorize recipes except the ones that were orally taught to me. A quart of flour is interesting.
Same with me. I have a few, like the ratio of ingredients for a salad dressing that my mother taught me orally, that I have in my head, but they are definitely the exception. Since families tended to be larger back then, maybe people were making larger recipes and thought in terms of quarts.
I made biscuits and pie crusts so often that I never looked at a recipe. When my children lived at home, I didn’t need a recipe for pancakes, either.
Same here but those days are long gone and now I do look at recipes..
My mom made the best biscuits from feel. I miss them so much. She never used a recipe for cornbread either. I loved her cornbread sticks.
She sounds like she was a wonderful cook.
She was.
I also have a few memorized – and there are a few more where I usually look at the recipe when I make them, but I think that I could actually make them without the recipe in a pinch.
Interesting, I wonder how many women did memorize these facts. With them, they could make many things without a recipe.
I can almost picture a home ec teacher having students memorize these facts.
Haha! My mom was a home economics teacher!
Too much mental work! Once I figure out a recipe, that’s why I write it down, and I doubt that these were terribly accurate especially since the flour is measured in volume rather than weight. And as for the oven temperatures, a bit too high I think.
Same with me. When I figure out a recipe – especially an online one that I’ve tweaked – after we’ve eaten the food, I think about whether I am likely to want to make it again, and if I think I might, I’ll immediately write it down. I also thought that the temperatures seemed a little high. I think that they were still figuring out temperatures as people were rapidly shifting to gas and electric stoves in 1925.
And often wood too, Sheryl! That was even harder to control.
Definitely – it was very challenging to regulate the fire to get a certain temperature for baking.
Oh i had a bit of a giggle over this! I only know a quart measure for liquids …
sherry
I also was surprised to see the use of quarts as a measure of flour. They must have been doing some heavy duty baking to use that much flour.
I have never know a quart to measure anything but liquid like Sherry….that’s equivalent to 4 cups of flour..I think I’ll stick to what I know already but its interesting .
Except for when I’m canning, I never think in terms of quarts.
I am the same way.
It was a different era of cooks who committed these types of information to memory.
They did not have smart phones and computers to look stuff up they don’t know like we do.
I’m sure we all have recipes in our memories, but these facts not so much!
I know that 3 teaspoons equal a tablespoon, and a few other cooking facts, but nothing like this list.