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A Database of Historical Cookbooks

• kanobo 6y ago
  I'm personally interested in what old fast food and junk food used to taste like, for example the recipe to the original Coke drink: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-recipe https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-recipe. I wish I could go back and taste a 50's In-N-Out meal.
  • dutchmartin 6y ago
    Sounds like a great idea to start a museum (exhibition) with. You could make a 50’s restaurant with various food offerings that were popular then.
    • antupis 6y ago
      Or restaurant which copies very precisely some famous historical restaurant menu.
      • deleted 6y ago
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      • JacobDotVI 6y ago
        You might be interested in the restaurant Next in Chicago. From the Wikipedia: >Rather than stick with one type of cuisine, Next completely changes its style every few months, focusing on a different time period, parts of the world, or various abstract themes for each "season" of its menu. Next's very first menu was "Paris 1906" which was based on Escoffier's dishes from that year. https://chicago.eater.com/2011/4/4/6688919/next-restaurants-paris-1906-menu-in-pictures https://chicago.eater.com/2011/4/4/6688919/next-restaurants-...
      • Wistar 6y ago
        Although, depending on the era, sourcing all the identical ingredients may be impossible, or nearly so, due to "culinary extinction." Lenore Newman's recent book, "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food," explores the foods lost to the world. In late 2019, the Gastropod podcast ran an episode with Newman and the "Ghost Foods." https://gastropod.com/of-ghost-foods-and-culinary-extinction/ https://gastropod.com/of-ghost-foods-and-culinary-extinction... Also, it has become very hard to find things such as true buttermilk or real heavy cream that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized, etc.
  • kritiko 6y ago
    I recommend Paul Freedman's Ten Restaurants That Changed America. The section on Howard Johnson's is very interesting.
  • proverbialbunny 6y ago
    Lard burgers and fries are really good. I highly recommend checking them out. It may not be the exact taste of a brand from the past, but it will be closer to the taste of a mom and pop burger stand pre 1970s.
• helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  I recently read and was amazed that ”The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy“ by Hannah Glasse, published in 1747 was a best seller around the English speaking world for over a hundred years. “We had emancipated ourselves from the sceptre of King George, but that of Hannah Glasse was extended without challenge over our fire-sides and dinner-tables, with a sway far more imperative and absolute"
  • contingencies 6y ago
    Seems English tables of the 18th century were quite the culinary scene: this is exactly contemporaneous with the famed Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich#The_sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sand...
• galkk 6y ago
  The more I try to cook, the deeper respect I have for historical cooks. The things that we have for granted now, like thermometers, stoves where one could set the level of heat were unavailable and cooking almost anything besides very simple dishes was quite hard.
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  • wiz21c 6y ago
    If you cook a lot, you'll soon realize that cooking without all the technological advances is actually easier. After some time one develops an instinct of how things should be be (based on color, taste, size, even sound !). For example, if one wants too cook onions, choosing between butter and oil, checking the colour, checking if it's cooked or not, deciding to add some water at some point, or additional stuff to induce better Maillard's reaction, etc. All of that you'll be able to do it without resorting to technology. That's what I find so gratifying about cooking. After 20 years, I can now make things that taste much better than in the past I'm not always sure of why :-) But lots of practice sure make a difference and it's rewarded. Plus additional bonus : you make many better moments in your life that don't cost much ! But granted, technological advances makes somethings better. For example cooking under vacuum allows you a incredible level of control on what you do plus much healthier result.
    • schwartzworld 6y ago
      I think he's talking about more basic technology. For example, cooking eggs in a non-stick pan is significantly easier, and even regular pans have uniform surfaces that heat evenly. Things like silicone cooking tools, food professors, even just ovens where you can set a temperature are all miracle breakthroughs compared to how cooking was done in the past.
      • YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
        I remember both my grandmothers cooking and I don't remember either of them speaking about food processors or say pressure cookers in terms of "miracles". Both grew up and learned to cook at a time when such niceties where not available. I myself cook most of my food in simple pots and pans with simple utensils no different than what would have been available even a thousand years ago. Ovens are another matter- but even there, the variation between different modern ovens (e.g. how quickly they reach a certain temperature) means that experience with a particular oven is much more important than precision. So I think "miracle breakthroughs" is an exaggeration. Those are things that are more "nice to have" than "absolutely indispensible". If I wanted to admit to an exception- I've made mayonnaise by hand and by hand mixer. The former is a pain in the ass and takes a lot longer. Even so, having made it by hand I understand how the ingredients work together so I know what to do with the hand mixer. Which is not something you can know if you've always made it with a mixer. So you're actually losing something with too much technology in cooking, so I think anyway.
• bakuninsbart 6y ago
  If I do cook german cuisine, I will usually use Henriette Davidis book, it is detailed yet simple, and unpretentious, which I don't often find in good cookbooks. Apparently the db even has her book in English, so if people here are interested in cooking german food, I think it is a really good recommendation. One of my favorite aspects is how she will usually give recommendations about using everything that you might usually think is trash. If you're cooking on a budget, these old cookbooks are actually incredibly helpful.
  • cehrlich 6y ago
    If you ever want to cook Austrian cuisine, the definitive book is "Die Gute Küche" by Plachutta. If you can find a used old copy, it's pretty much in plain text so it's very easy to run it through OCR translation.
• deleted 6y ago
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• mem0r1 6y ago
  Is the database (or the underlying data) available as a SQL database, CSV, or similar ?
• dinamic 6y ago
  From project's FAQ (https://thesifter.org/Home/Faq https://thesifter.org/Home/Faq): Q: What is not in the Sifter? A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes. Seems to be a bit useless without it.
  • zo1 6y ago
    I spent a good 15 minutes trying to get to that data. I should have gone to the FAQ first instead of "diving" right in with excitement.
  • boomer_joe 6y ago
    Useless is an understatement.
  • jasode 6y ago
    >A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes. Seems to be a bit useless without it. Yes, it's "useless" if one wants the The Sifter to be a source of recipes. Instead, the Sifter's goal appears to be a database of meta information[1] (e.g. ingredients, techniques, etc) of recipes and not the full text of recipes themselves. An analogy might be a website of baseball statistics[2]. Yes, one can also complain that site is "useless" because it doesn't include videos of the actual games. But others can use it to see when black players first appeared, trends of batting averages, trends of pitcher rotations, etc. A researcher wouldn't need the actual films of gameplay to answer those types of questions and a database of meta info about baseball actually enables faster lookup. [1] excerpt: >The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/ https://www.baseball-reference.com/
    • fermienrico 6y ago
      Hmm... how many people go oh let me check what the stats are for black pepper in 18th century? Baseball metrics have value on its own to a vast number of people. Cookbook metadata has little value to most people beyond the academic researchers. This is a poor analogy, no offense.
• newyankee 6y ago
  that is so amazing. A friend found an old Indian cookbook in an obscure language which was 80 years old and realized that even some daily food evolved so much just in the span of a century
• dmitriid 6y ago
  As a person who doesn't cook very well, the value I find in most old cookbooks (and a surprising number of modern cookbooks) is just that: historical. And sometimes the sadness that no one makes certain dishes anymore. But I can't for the life of me figure something like "Stew until ready. Not long before it's ready add finely chopped garlic" [1] or "Prepare the duck, stuff it and stew until done" [2] Give me times, and temperatures, and sizes, and weights! And don't start me on the weights :D Cups, and spoons, and whatever else are not valid systems of measure :) [1] Moldovan Beef Stew from "Moldovan Cuisine", Eronina, Avaeva. Chisinau, 1990 [2] Stuffed Duck with Buckwheat Kasha [3] from "Jewish Cuisine", Lebowich, Meisel. Riga, 1991. [3] Kasha, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasha
  • hadeson 6y ago
    Cooking is really an art with lots of tacit knowledge that vary too much to put in a simple recipe.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet "You want to go to 57th street? No problem, lady. I'm going to 5th avenue. Just watch me! When I get off, yours was the stop before." (video pairing: Recipe For Disaster, orig. "Masha + Kasha", with The Trouble With Tribbles)
  • YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    >> Give me times, and temperatures, and sizes, and weights! The thing is, it's pointless to give such precise instructions because they will only ever work for one time and one time only, the time the recipe was (presumably) tested. After that, everything you do as you carry out the instructions in the recipe with absolute precision, like a little robot chef, will still produce a different result not least because your ingredients are no longer the ingredients used in the original recipe. So for example, if someone tells you to stew a pound of beef "until ready"- the imprecision matches reality. Your pound of beef will not be the same as the pound of beef of the chef who wrote the recipe. It won't be the same as my pound of beef. It won't be the same as anyone else's pound of beef. And it won't be ready in the same exact time as everyone else's pound of beef. Not even if we're all eating from the same, very large, animal. Like I say in another comment, a recipe is not a precise set of instructions that leads to a reproducible result, like a computer program or an algorithm. It's a template, a mnemonic, an informal description of how to achieve a result in the ballpark of a certain target. I think this is one reason why many people have trouble with cooking, even when they're very good at following instructions: because they treat recipes as instructions to be followed, rather than a discussion, a debate if you like, between two cooks, or a source of inspiration.
• stareatgoats 6y ago
  What a treasure it would have been, recipes from several thousand cookbooks since the turn of the first millennium or older, but alas - there are no recipes here. This may be at best useful for laymen like me as an index for ingredients, prior to getting the actual book from a library or similar. Amazing example of cataloging effort though.
• pelasaco 6y ago
  I'm confused. On the linked site, it's tagged as gender, feminism and cookbook.. the Sifter itself has no recipes at all? Is that some kind of trolling?
• tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  One of my "if I ever become insanely rich I'm doing this" ideas is to have a culinary museum. Imagine exhibits of cooking utensils and traditions from around the world, with guest experts who can cook some of the items for you. So it becomes a walk/learn/sample kind of experience.
• bovermyer 6y ago
  As someone who works on a program that procedurally generates fictional cultures, including their culinary side, this is a godsend. It allows me to inspect patterns and the evolution of cuisine over time. This will greatly enhance the accuracy and believeability of the generated cultures.
  • airkumar 6y ago
    Very cool that you are generating fictional cultures! This resource only structures Western food cultures (probably because a lot of ancient Eastern & African histories relied on oral traditions rather than written, which has been harder to capture and structure pre-voice tech.) As a result, the patterns you detect and stories you generate will be limited to those Western sources; maybe that could be interesting, but I imagine combining those with other traditions around the world would lead to far more novel fictions. Have you been able to find good structured data about Asian/African food? If not, it would be cool to figure out a way to start building that sort of database so that your stories draw from a fuller set of information and traditions! I think voice tech and the improvement in transcriptions + gpt3-like tools will help us start capturing and structuring oral histories much more effectively and quickly than ever before.
    • bovermyer 6y ago
      Getting data on non-Western cultural traits and patterns has been a challenge. I've had to rely primarily on anecdotes and articles found online. Food history is a relatively recent study, so texts are hard to come by.
• airkumar 6y ago
  This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in Asia/Africa. The fact that these western recipes/techniques are more well-documented than eastern techniques is one factor in why western cuisine has historically received a lot more attention in restaurants/cooking schools as well as popular media (we'll set aside colonial biases, etc for now.) As we use structured data to draw inferences and then guide actions more and more (ML -> AI...) the fact that databases like this skew entirely western will lead to distorted suggestions in applications that, say, aim to generate cooking curricula programmatically to teach cooking (I'm sure y'all can think of better examples than that.) I wonder if voice technology can help capture oral histories, oral traditions, and allow those to be structured in a way that only written traditions have been in the recent past. There is hope! We'll all be better for it, too, when we can access the histories and traditions (many of which have been lost, or almost lost, at this point) of the whole world, not just a small section of it.
  • Finnucane 6y ago
    The bulk of the Schlesinger collection was donated by Julia Child from her personal library, and yes, English-language cookbooks covering Asian and and especially African cuisine were scarce before 1940. And Child was definitely a Francophile when it came to food, so her collection was skewed that way.
• jungletime 6y ago
  Would be interesting to find obscure ingredients. Imagine discovering something as good as chocolate. You would be a billionaire. Garum, Rome's Favorite Condiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY
• citizenpaul 6y ago
  Clickbait garbage. First thing I look for...a database of the cookbook recipies. Oh its just a database of cookbooks so basically a crappy version of amazon. Not the actual information in them.
• deleted 6y ago
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• thekyle 6y ago
  This isn't specifically related to this database (since it doesn't contain recipes), but how cool would it be to finetune a GPT model on hundreds of thousands of recipes and have it generate new ones to try.
• davidmoffatt 6y ago
  I agree with dinamic 1. Not suitable for a blob on hacker news. It would be cool if it had the text + translations but... Also there are some obvious errors. One item is noted as being from a periodical from the year 4.... Hmm I think not.