I love that Celeste serves many of her grandmother’s recipes in her restaurant and it made me think about how many things I cook and bake that I got from my mother, who in turn got it from hers. How many heirloom recipes do you still use in your cooking and baking?
Don’t you adore the opening an old or well-used cookbook to find & immediately recognize the “favorite pages”. Always identifiable by the old food smudges and writings on the page. So often I’ll open the cookbooks I’ve collected to recreate the tried and true recipes of the women who possessed the book before me. My grandmother Selma, for lack of cookbooks, would paste old cut recipes, recipe cards and notes from coveted magazines into old school books to create her own cookbook of treasured recipes.
From her hand crafted cookbooks I created my menu and we serve these recipes in my café “Chaps”. I had a great time preparing a few of those recipes with Guy Fieri of the Food Networks “Diners Drive’ ins and Dives” this past summer.
One of the most delightful elements to some of these recipes is the cooking language, and measurement. In appreciation of truly following the same recipes we have all tucked away somewhere, I offer you a cooking glossary to recreate old recipes in your modern kitchen today.
Food Language: This is one of the most complete lists I frequently use, it’s where I first looked up “Amuse-Bouche”: http://www.atomicgourmet.com
Find heirloom Weights and measures: http://homecooking.about.com/library/weekly//bloldconvert.htm
If you love food history, check out this food timeline: http://www.foodtimeline.org/
Enjoy!
I inherited my grandmother’s massive cookbook collection when she died 17 years ago. I love nothing more than to open one of her cookbooks to find her personal notes on a recipe’s pro’s/con’s in her beautiful handwriting.