If you’ve ever been handed an really old recipe card or looked through old cookbooks then you might have seen some terms that didn’t make a lot of sense. Today we have standardized weights and measures, stove and oven settings, and a range of ingredients. But, anything we don’t we can just look up online, right? Not always- sometimes this info can be hard to find, especially if you just want to get started making great-grandma’s fruitcake without stopping to look things up every minute. So here are some old terms (ones that might seem weird) from vintage recipes explained so you can finally decipher those old “receipts” as they used to be called.
Ingredient Names
Bouquet in cooking terms doesn’t refer to flowers. Instead you gather together fresh herbs into a bundle, secure them with string, and then place them into a pot of stew or a braised dish to flavor the food. The little bundle looks like a bouquet, hence the name. Some common herbs to include are parsley, thyme, and marjoram.
Clabber milk is a term you really don’t across very often these days. If you see it in an old recipe it means milk that has stood out until it thickens and turns slightly sour. Of course this was long before refrigeration so milk had ample time to turn sour. People looked for ways to use it up even though it was no longer fresh. This form of milk can add leavening to baked goods and the only real remnant of its use is in a famous brand of baking powder called Clabber Girl that’s still sold today. A modern substitution is buttermilk.
If you see a really old recipe that calls for mango in the US it probably doesn’t mean the sweet fruit that grows well in hot climates. It is more likely that it refers to a bell pepper, since that was the common name for them in some areas even into the 1960s. Although some cooks used this term to refer to wide range of fruits and veggies.
Units of Measure
“1-2” used to mean 1/2, which is quite confusing if you read old recipes. 1-2 teaspoons vanilla is pretty different than 1/2 a teaspoon, so be aware of this if you have old recipe cards in your collection.
Really old recipes used the notation “do” to mean “same as above” in the list of ingredients.
“A few grains”of an ingredient is equal to less than 1/8 teaspoon. Today we would probably call this a pinch.
A dram is about 3/4 teaspoon but can also mean just a splash of something, especially alcohol.
“Butter the size” of an egg means 1/4 cup.
A gill is 1/2 cup or about 4 ounces.
Sometimes no units of measure were given at all. The recipe writers might have specified the types of produce to be used, with no amounts given. The cook was supposed to eyeball how much was needed for their exact purpose and according to how much they had in supply.
Cooking Techniques
To “scald milk” means heat milk over medium in shallow/wide pan to 180˚F then allow to cool. To bring something to “blood heat” means to bring it to around 98˚F.
Corning means to pickle, as in corned beef. The corn in this term refers to corns or rocks of salt used in the process.
A slack oven refers to an oven that’s cooling down after having been heated to a certain temperature. This would be called for when very gently cooking something or cooking something over a long period.