Getting Baked
There is no doubt in my mind that cooking with gas is better than cooking with electricity. The evidence is in the cakes I attempted yesterday. They both sucked. One only cooked on one side. seriously. It was raw. Still smelled good, but inedible. I tried to rebake it, but instead it burned.
Succeeded this morning with a pumpkin/walnut/raisin cake, though. I turned it for more even baking part-way through. What a pain in the ass! I should figure out a way to put a rotating shelf in that piece of crap my landlord calls an oven.
Look it up.
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<i>What's cooler than cool? Ice cold!</i> --Andree 3K
Why did a dude win the Home Ec award in 7th & 8th grade?
You and Bill both.
From the Cornell Site:
<i>At the turn of the 20th century, home economics was a critical pathway into higher education for American women, largely associated with co-educational land grant institutions such as Cornell. From its inception, collegiate home economics was multidisciplinary and integrative with an emphasis on science applied to the real world of the home, families and communities.</i>
People (mostly women) started using accurate, scientific measurements and recipies, using science in cooking. Before this, recipies used inaccurate measurements, such as 'a handfull' of something. Measuring the temperatures of ovens, uniform measurements, and science in food allowed cooks to make more complicated (and tasty) food, and repeat successes. Women were at the forefront of this movement, and started Home Economics schools such as the Fanny Farmer Cooking School, a very important (and serious) academy at the time. It was positively revolutionary.
Honar the Librarian knows a lot more about this than I do, as she's spending a lot of time with historical cookbooks nowadays. Honar, can you give us examples of the crazy units of measurement used before the Home Economics Movement?
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<i>What's cooler than cool? Ice cold!</i> --Andree 3K
There's also some really interesting stuff on Melville Dewey's relationship with home economics, and how that effected the DDC schedules (in Dewey terms, home-ec is classified at 640, making it a technology, which is to say, an applied science). I'll see if I can dig up the article I'm thinking of--so far I'm havig a google failure. Stupid key word searching.
To boil a Breast of Veal
Joynt it well and parboil it a little, then put it in a stewing pan or deep dish, with some strong broth and a bundle of sweet herbs well bound up, some large mace, and some slices of interlarded bacon, two or three cloves, some capers, samphire, salt, spinage, yolks of hard eggs, and white wine; stew all these well together, being tender boil'd, serve it on fine carved sippets, and broth it: then have some fryed sweetbreads, sausages of veal or pork, garlick, or none, and run all over with butter, lemon and fryed parsley over all. Thus you may boil a rack or loin of veal.
More a lack of measurments than unintelligable ones (for those, I'm partial to the "scant handful").
To boil a Breast of Veal
Joynt it well and parboil it a little, then put it in a stewing pan or deep dish, with some strong broth and a bundle of sweet herbs well bound up, some large mace, and some slices of interlarded bacon, two or three cloves, some capers, samphire, salt, spinage, yolks of hard eggs, and white wine; stew all these well together, being tender boil'd, serve it on fine carved sippets, and broth it: then have some fryed sweetbreads, sausages of veal or pork, garlick, or none, and run all over with butter, lemon and fryed parsley over all. Thus you may boil a rack or loin of veal.
More a lack of measurments than unintelligable ones (for those, I'm partial to the "scant handful").