The Missing Pieces

I've read lots of cookbooks, old and new - I love to see what flavor combinations people come up with and the variety of ingredients they use. I was at first surprised by the paucity of instruction in older cookbooks. Though I first thought, "Why didn't my grandmother include "time and temperature" in Lena's Swedish Tea Ring?" the answer finally dawned on me. She didn't include it because she already knew how to make it; the recipe was just a way of recording the ingredients and their proportions.

I'm not a proficient baker so it's not easy for me to fill in the blanks. One thing I will try, as I cast around with this, is to compare early editions of a long running cookbook standard, such as the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, to see how recipes change from edition to edition. Enough recipes move from one to the next that it should be easy (ha?) to see how the instructions change over time and what the editors felt could no longer be taken for granted.

I've been reading Kitchen Literacy. While it focuses on marketing and purchasing foodstuffs through time, there may be some clues there. It certainly has a good bibliography to start from!