Shoutout to my grandma's old recipe box for helping me finally get her biscuit recipe right

After three years of flat, dense results, I finally realized last Tuesday that her 'cup of milk' meant the specific blue tin cup she kept by her sink, not a standard measuring cup.

3 comments

3 Comments

anna9831mo ago

My great aunt's recipe for stew just says "cook until done." I found out that meant three hours on her old stove, but only two on my modern one. Those old notes were a whole system of knowledge that got lost when we switched to exact measurements. It's like they were writing for themselves, not for some future person with a digital scale. You have to almost reverse engineer their kitchen to make it work.

seth251mo ago

My mom's cookbook has notes like that everywhere, like "a good handful of flour." It makes you realize how much cooking used to be about feel and memory, not exact numbers. Getting that right must have been such a good moment.

wesleymitchell24d ago

Ever notice how we've lost that with so many things, like @anna983 said about the stove? Feels like we traded useful feel for empty precision sometimes.