My goal is to continue collecting these cookbooks, currently largely from Maryland and the mid-Atlantic where I live but also further afield, and “modernize” the recipes for today’s home cooks.
The contributors to these cookbooks are generally not cookbook authors or recipe developers but are sharing recipes they enjoyed enough they wanted to share with the rest of the world.
Of course, many of these recipes can be made exactly as they were written down, no “modernizing” is needed.
However, many recipes may be written in archaic or vague language. It’s common to see recipes call for one “egg” of butter or give the instruction “bake until done in a hot oven” which can leave you wondering for how long and at what temperature do you need to bake that cake?
Some recipes call for a level of familiarity with the cuisine, baking, or cooking that people may not have today—it’s common for a recipe to call for a homemade pie crust but not include a recipe or not provide visual clues because they assume the reader has a firm background in the kitchen.
Occasionally, recipes call for commercial ingredients no longer readily available such as a particular cake mix or extract. How can we work around that? Can we?
Other recipes call for substitutions for ingredients that would not be necessary today. Now that we can buy a wide range of ingredients from all over the world at any supermarket and we have the whole internet at our disposal, what a home cook can reasonably source at home has fundamentally changed. In these cases, I look at what a recipe called for and reverse engineer it to get it back to how it most likely was before the decades of outdated substitution suggestions.
I find a lot of recipes call for canned or boxed ingredients that while quicker, might not yield as tasty a result as using fresh, and adjust those recipes accordingly.
I encountered recipes that required equipment that once was ubiquitous but is now uncommon—do you have a steamed pudding mold handy? A clamp-on meat grinder? How do we work around that?
Still, more recipes simply don’t work! The proportions are off, the flavors are murky, and the timing is incorrect. A lot can go wrong with a recipe!
Once I pick out a recipe, I rewrite it to reflect how I think it would not only taste best but how people would actually want to make it at home. After that, I make the recipe several times to see if my guess is correct and what, if anything, needs to be changed. After I’m convinced that I have the recipe and technique down, I get to cooking and make it until I am sure I get the desired results as written every time. Finally, I write up the recipe and try to include any helpful hints, serving suggestions, history, or explanation of changes that anyone who wants to make the recipe might find helpful.
It’s a long, time-consuming process but the result is (hopefully!) a recipe anyone can make and enjoy.