Moving roughly 50 years forward in time from Mrs. Curtis: two recipes written on the back pages of the 1949 Joy of Cooking by Elizabeth Walcutt Daingerfield (called Libby), my daughter Elizabeth’s grandmother. These two are truly minimal recipes, expecting the reader to supply all sorts of information not in the text.
There are several much more detailed recipes from Libby, but these are two that really amount to notes to herself (though her daughter Ann did manage to cook from them). One pie, one cake:
Apple Pie
½ cup Butter
1½ .. Sugar
2 Eggs
T Nutmeg
1 cup Chopped Apples
Just the ingredients for the filling, no directions for preparation or cooking. And no pie crust recipe.
Pecan Cake
1 cup butter
2 .. sugar
4 .. flour
2 # raisins
1 # pecans
1 whole nutmeg
1 glass tumbler whiskey
6 eggs
2 heaping teaspoons baking powdercook slowly
This one at least has a hint about cooking temperature and time.
But otherwise they assume that the reader has master recipes for pie and for cake, into which these ingredients (in these amounts) can be slotted.
May 2, 2012 at 8:46 am |
More recently, Elizabeth David’s recipes (written mostly during the 50s and 60s, though updated by her in later editions of her books) tend to call for “a wineglass” of some liquid, and assume that the cook knows how to handle basic techniques.
The Joy of Cooking style, with precise measurements and detailed instructions (carried to a welcome extreme by Julia Child), has certainly come to characterize U.S. cookbooks.
May 5, 2012 at 10:57 am |
[…] for some really old recipes (see here, here, and here) — like the Virgin Mary’s recipe for spinach. As relayed by George Leonard […]