Resources for the Home Cook, Part 1

They still look friendly, don’t they? Also, I have a lot of want for that kitchen.

Okay! Between inflation and product shortages, people are telling me a lot about the struggles they’re having both in procuring their desired goods and working out substitutions when it’s not possible. Accordingly, we’re doing a repost of this series in hopes that some of the information here will help y’all manage this more easily (and I no longer live where the stinging catepillars rained from the sky):

I have to break this up into at least 2 posts because I have too much to say, and too many resources to offer for a single post. Let’s hope for 2, yeah?

Most of you are home now, and looking at a bunch of food that you might not know what to do with it. Or maybe you’ve already been home for the last two+ weeks and are bored out of your mind with what to eat. And just cooking daily in general. As such, I figured I’d give you a bunch of resources. Some of these might seem weird, but it’s a weird time.

Conversions and Substitutions

You may find that recipes are asking for measurements you don’t understand or ingredients you don’t have. In the vast majority of ingredient issues, there’s a substitution! Check out this link on how to replace what you’re missing for your baking projects with what you aren’t! Correspondingly, here’s how you replace various items in a non-baking recipe! This second link has a pretty cool printable chart that’s aesthetically pleasing in addition to being useful.

Beyond that, you need a measurements converter, though you can also download a number of apps for that, so you can easily convert recipes from one type of unit to another. This site does decent conversions for baking, but if you’re using non-standard flours you will need to do some more research for conversions specific to what you’re up to. There are, of course, also apps for this sort of thing.

This site’s chart is not as comprehensive as some of you might like (because lacks the full range of flours), but it will get the job done!

Scales

I know that some of you get upset with me that I use a scale for measurements rather than measuring cups, as well as that these measurements can’t always be converted directly due to ingredient choices (lookin’ at you, gluten-free flours!). I really do know this bothers some of you, and I really do give my all to convert them into volumetric for you where possible. That said, because we all live in different circumstances and have different knowledge bases, such as how one measures flour (as the most common example), giving measurements in weight is the only way to give a recipe that should produce consistent results across the board. It also allows me to just bake, because the scale sits there with my bread bowl on it, and then I can bake as I normally do and simply pause to write down changes on the scale.

I really do recommend you pick up a cheap scale that you can hang on the wall. You don’t have to, but your work will be more consistent if you do. I personally live in a shoebox that has Home Depot shelves lining the breakfast nook to make space for all my kitchen gear that won’t fit in the kitchen itself. Because I don’t have the type of kitchen pictured above, having big, fancy equipment in my kitchen is a bit of a nightmare. By “bit,” I really mean, “omg where is this thing gonna go?! I’d better be getting the value of the space it’s taking!!!!!” I get really fussy about this at times, because my space is at a premium! Sometimes I get so fussy that I try to stop Sabrina from sending me equipment I objectively do need to have so I can learn how to make things (lookin’ at you, yogurt!) the way y’all make them instead of only knowing my weird, wackadoo, hippie ways.

If you can afford it, please get a scale. You really can hang them on the wall. That’s how I get to keep my scale - the wall! I have an old Salter scale I got in… early part of the century, I think, but there are a number you can choose that are both affordable and hangable! Here is an example.

I’ve had this thing so long I forgot that it used to have that metal plate. I wonder where that plate went, anyway! I’d show you my actual scale, but then I’d have to clean my kitchen first and I just cannot with all that right now.

How to Measure Flour

I honestly forgot that most people are not taught how to do this correctly, but it’s come up a lot recently. So let’s talk about that:

What you need to know is that in recipes, flour is measured based on aerated volume. That means that when you open your bag of flour, scoop some out, level your cup, or similar, you’ve used too much. Flour in bags and in jars is compacted, and therefore way too dense for your recipe.

So what do you do? You’ve got 2 options:

1. You can sift your flour, then measure.

2. You can fluff your flour up (I usually do this with a fork or a spoon, but forks are better), use your fork to “sift” the flour into the measuring cup until it’s overfilled, then level the cup

Please do this if you’re using volumetric measurements. If you don’t, you will likely send me a picture at some point of a dough that doesn’t look like it’s meant to. In literally every case in which I receive those pictures or hear reports about insane density in a bread that shouldn’t have it, it’s due to improper measurements. Here’s a video!

Finding the Calm

Before you bake, you should find your calm. I know this sounds stupid, but even experienced bakers need to find their calm before they start. Set yourself up right for this: measure out all your ingredients and get them ready to be used. Yes, it’s more dishes. But it’s also a more peaceful experience if you’re not trying to grab and measure things on demand.

Read through your recipe twice before doing anything. We know you skimmed. We know because it’s what we all do. But really read your recipes - find out what the author is asking you to do! Once you know that, your mental check list of what needs to be done is already set up and organized for you. Keep that recipe with you while you work, too, so you can refer back to it often.

Don’t panic. If something goes wrong, pause, catch your breath, and see what you might have done. Check that recipe again. And then move forward, even if it’s not quite right. No one should be shooting for perfection, unless you happen to be a perfectionist. You should be shooting for yummy. Yummy doesn’t care about looks, it doesn’t care about minor screw ups, and often some major screw ups can yield to even yummier things than you thought you might end up with! So relax, and just be present and along for the ride. It’s easier this way.

I should like to be on the beach right now. I am instead cooped up in my apartment like everyone else. Baking restores my calm, though, so win win!

A Listy List of Resources

Yep, that’s right. Lists. I’m literally just going to give some lists of resources right now, because you should be able to peruse at your own pace.

First: your public library will have online books you can check out with recipes in them. Ditto the New York Public Library, who has made their digital collections available to everyone. When I start itemizing books, I want y’all to go to NYPL and see if you can download it for free. In many cases, it’s likely.

I’d like to start with historical foods, because those honestly tend to be most useful in emergency situations. Because they’re already low tech in most cases. I’m going to do my best not to make this an overwhelming set of lists for y’all, but no promises because historical cookery really is my thing. Like, really my thing. Probably to a level that’s irritating to my IRL comrades.

Libraries are the real houses of knowledge: free, widely available, frequently digitized, and can teach you basically anything.

Know Your Ingredients, Prevent Food Waste

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, but globally, 1/3 of all food produced for human consumption winds up in landfills. That is 1.3 billion tonnes of food. Every year. It’s also a massive driver for climate change, and climate change contributes to new contagions that can spread around the world.

How you avoid this is by understanding what you’ve got. This means you’ve got to get your Google Fu up to speed!

Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of oranges. Those are good to have, because nutritious, can last a couple months in the fridge, can be used for a lot of different things, and also are pretty tasty. You’re eating an orange every day, livin’ the good life, and throwing away the peels. Wait, what? You’re throwing away those peels?! No! There are things you can do with those peels because they are actually food! You can make candied peels (from any citrus, not just oranges), you can grate the rind from the orange before you peel it and freeze or dry it to use later as a spice or in baking, you can also stick them in some vinegar to infuse it with flavor. Or, if you stocked up on booze before the pandemic hit, you can make liquor from them!

What about apple peels and cores? You can make apple cider from them, and even turn them into vinegar!

Leftover wine (haha)? Freeze in ice cube trays and use them in recipes or to quickly chill wine without diluting it!

Leftover bread? If you’re making bread, you probably have some failed loaves or just too much bread. You can make some beautiful bread puddings or stratas, blend into bread crumbs, croutons, or make traditional English puddings! I use literally every kind of bread product for this. If bread gets too stale to eat normally, I cut it into cubes and freeze it until I have enough to do one of these things with it. Often I will have bread puddings made of a mix of wheat breads, muffins, English muffins, bagels, rye bread, cornbread. I don’t really care what the bread is - if it’s some kind of bread, it can go into one of these options and probably more besides!

Don’t forget to save all those veggie scraps and meat bones in the freezer to make stock with!

Whatever the leftover bits are in your kitchen, take a moment to Google to see what you can do with them. There probably really is something you can do beyond binning or composting! Always look up whatever it is you’re about to throw away to make sure that you do need to throw it away and can’t use it for something else. This is the fundamental way to not waste food: research, research, research!

Lastly, I want to encourage those of you who use social media to take on the Food Waste Fridays challenge! Long ago, The Frugal Girl started this up, as she learned to reduce waste. It was helpful to everyone who participated, including me. I think she doesn’t do it anymore, but it’s still an incredibly helpful way of managing your own food use and waste with public accountability.

The basic premise of this is that you endure the humiliation of posting pictures, every Friday, of all the food you’re gonna throw away. You’re meant to hang onto it until you do the Friday post, but you can also just take pictures of whatever you toss as you go along, then post them all at once on Fridays. Legit, this is humiliating at first. Really, deeply, humiliating. I did this in my old personal blog for a long time, and the humiliation of having to admit and show off what I was throwing away ultimately reduced me to nearly zero food waste. If you’re on a/some social media platform, start doing Food Waste Friday: within a month you will find your food waste has dropped to none or close to none. You will be shocked to learn how much you’re wasting that you don’t have to, and it will help you view your food critically and with a mind toward using instead of binning.

Do the Dew. Except not Mountain Dew - Research Dew!

Medieval and Early Modern Cookery

Well, that got weird fast, huh? Or maybe you don’t know that yet. In the medieval period, you saw a lot of one pot meals. Like, mostly what they ate tended to be one pot meals. Mainly because it was fuel efficient and people didn’t have globalisation yet to ensure they could have any imaginable product whenever they wanted it. There are some strange ingredients you see, and especially during the early modern period, which is not medieval but frequently gets lumped into it when discussing historical foods from before around the 18th-century.

Medieval cooking blogs abound, even though you might not have known that. The Medieval Cookery blog has what I consider to be the best set of resources, because these recipes are largely translated for you into modern English and make some changes based on how we cook today, with ingredients that are more common today.

Medieval Cookery’s site is a goldmine. It gives you actual medieval books (either digitized or transcripted, and sometimes also translated), and even have a page where you can pick based on the country in question!

Old Cook has a lot of resources as well, and seems to always make fewer assumptions about the prior knowledge bases of their readership. This means they explain things a little better, and they also understand that for the modern cook, seeing recipes without quantities is a bit off-putting. Most good sites will give you at least some approximate quantities, but not all do. Recipes during this and the early modern era almost never had quantities, because they were really being written for estate cooks and chefs. Since those people already knew what was what, as well as what the final product should look, taste, and feel like, they just didn’t use measurements too often. Think of it like cooking with your Nan, where you heard a whole lot of “some" of that, “a bit” of this, “a smidge,” or whatever random non-helpful quantities she told you as you watched her hands do magic! Channel your inner granny here.

Gode Cookery is a lovely site, but this is probably one that should be held off on a bit more until you’ve got some experience with this type of jazz. They are successful in doing conversions, but some things are gonna look kind of weird to you, because they’re weird to eat in our era. They have a lengthy list of digitized manuscripts and similar, also.

In the early modern period (which is my real area of expertise, despite rampant hobbyist medievalism on my part), a lot of stuff is similar to the medieval stuff, but not the same.

If you are really into historical foods, you may find this dissertation an interesting and entertaining educational opportunity. I also cannot highly enough recommend Townsends, whose son John Townsend makes some of the most entertaining, accessible educational videos that assume exactly no prior knowledge. He’s absolutely brilliant, truly. His series has expanded to include other forms of survival skills and reenactment stuff, but the real gold here is in how he teaches you to cook eighteenth-century foods. He’s an Americanist, so his focus is on these early modern American foods. That said, lots of crossover with British stuff. I would “like and subscribe,” as it were, to his channel. It’s addictive.

Martha Carlin offers a number of resources spanning from medieval to modernity, so I’d check out her site too! Of note in this site is an astounding large number of resources pertaining to medieval brewing. I hadn’t noticed that before today, but I plan to check them out because I brew using exclusively (save my stove, airlocks, and carboys) medieval methodology. Never hurts to get more ideas, yeah?

The Recipes Project is, if we’re being really fair here, magical. For realz. Y’all should check it out, if for no other reason than because you can learn some interesting and weird stuff in there about how people did things back when. Lots of documentation in this site (as is normal for period cookery sites), so you can follow the trail of their ideas to the original sources. They’ve even got an article explaining a lot about the differences in flavors preferred and used, and so on.

The sole focus of Cooking in the Archives is to modernize and make accessible early modern recipes to the contemporary cook. She puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the reader really does understand what she’s talking about, and that’s helpful for people for whom this is brand new.

Food in Early Modern Europe is on Google Books, and is also an excellent resource! Lastly, there’s this really cool post about applying food studies to actual cooking. When you look at the food they made, you’ll likely wish you’d been there to eat it!

What a cool painting!

The 19th Century… Dun dun dunnnnnnn!

Although I am generally always going to be distracted by anything pre-19th century as pertains to food, the 19th really is where it’s at for the contemporary home cook. The recipes tend to be a bit less weird, and you can find a lot more of them. Because Manifest Destiny.

As Americans along the eastern seaboard opted to colonize basically the whole continent, they were heavily reliant on the types of foods many of y’all probably have now. The recipes also tend to be adapted to shortages, because the stuff you might easily get in New York might not be so available in Oklahoma Territory, and certainly isn’t going to be available once you really get far out onto the Oregon Trail. If you don’t die from dysentery first, of course.

TBH, I find I die a lot more often of cholera in this game, but dysentery seems unfun as well.

Due to weather issues and attacks against colonists by indigenous peoples, eating people was a lot more common than you’d think it was back then. Because my sense of humor is warped and I sometimes got bored, I occasionally taught classes that really were geared in large part around cannibalism in the States. But we can avoid that, because we have grocery stores (even if they are out of toilet paper and flour right now)!

Y’all think I’m insane for bringing up cannibalism, don’t you? I’m bringing it up because I feel like it’s the easiest way possible, because it is so utterly ridiculous to talk about at all, to show you that you can make use of what’s in your kitchen now. Instead of Soylent Greening it up, we will learn to work with what’s available, and that’s the thing this century is so terribly useful for.

I almost went with a Charlton Heston meme, but this was too funny to ignore.

What’s very cool about the nineteenth century is that everyone can read the available resources, because the English is basically the same (albeit more flowery) as the English we use now.

If you’ve got kids, or you just really loved these books as a child, the Little House on the Prairie series is amazing for learning how to cook. I read these for the first time as an adult (because frankly, they bored me too much to read them as a child), and I was astonished by the number of recipes and the level of detail about food making and preservation contained in them. That’s the only reason they have a place on my shelf, since my kid isn’t quite old enough yet to get into these types of novels. The recipe I always remember is the salt pork “bacon” recipe. In one of the novels, they didn’t have bacon but did have salt pork. So they sliced it, then boiled it, and then fried it like bacon. Genius! To me, salt pork was for big pots of beans or greens, not for bacon replacement. But by boiling first, you extract all the insane levels of salt needed to preserve it so that it can be eaten as bacon. There’s a lot of information in those books on this topic, including even how to make cheese after you decide you need cheese badly enough to slaughter a calf. Super informative in an easily digestible format (because written for children).

American novels from this period tend to have a lot of this type of information. But since you’re stuck at home anyway, may as well read some things and get cooking help while doing so, yeah? You can ignore the British stuff, because if it involves food it generally also involves servants and zip on how the food was actually made. So go American here for the best info from novels.

Beyond novels that have nothing to do with cooking but teach you a lot anyway, there are so many blogs and websites that look at this period. The University of Reading offers a number of recipes from the 18th and 19th-centuries, primarily focusing on the 19th. Similarly, the Recipe Project has a number of offerings, but more importantly, they explain what types of things were scarce and how to work around that. During the panic shopping portion of Covid-19, these skills in how to cook without the usual fare matter a lot. The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies blog is also pretty great! Ditto Hearth and Home!

Savoring the Past has a few 19th-century recipes, but their holdings span the 17th-19th. Old Sturbridge Village will keep you busy for at least a couple of weeks, but try not to blame me if what they offer conflicts with your weight gain management during the Time of Constant Snacking (aka stay at home orders).

Looking for receipt books (early cookbooks) from the nineteenth-century can really yield some cool results! Miss Beecher has an entire guide on this, for example.

In an unrelated note…

I’ve probably given you plenty to dig through at this point, so I’m going to stop part one here.

But before I do, I want to complain about something entirely unrelated first. At my complex, and what seems to be specifically affecting my building, there are stinging caterpillars literally falling out of the sky. It started last week, and initially I wasn’t doing anything about it because there weren’t 50 bothering me and my garden yet. But then they started falling in orders of magnitude from the sky and the nearby oak tree. Because wind was literally blowing them off the oak and the birds, toads, and geckos can’t keep up. I killed a couple hundred yesterday. A. Couple. Of. Hundred. Stinging. Caterpillars. This is basically all I’ve been thinking about while writing this, because I can’t write outside like I like to due to caterpillars falling on my head no matter where I try to hide.

I’ve never hated a caterpillar before, but I hate the white-marked tussock moth caterpillar because they are currently terrorizing me with some sort of Biblical-style pestilence. Thank you for letting me abuse this forum to rant about this.