These kitchen and cooking tips can really come in handy when you're using Grandma's old fashioned dessert recipes. The historical recipes are shown exactly as first published, and sometimes you might need a wee bit of help. Practical tips were often passed down from one generation of cooks in a family to the next, and now they are passed on for you to use.
The vintage recipes sometimes contain outdated measurement terms like gill, salt-spoon, grain, and wineglass, making the quantities called for unclear. And because most old fashioned wood stoves of Grandma's day didn't have temperature gauges, only a few of the baking recipes provide accurate oven temperatures and cooking times.
So, I've gathered a collection of helpful hints to address the shortcomings of the old recipes along with some practical cooking methods to make your kitchen and baking chores easier. They'll also help to ensure that your homemade desserts will turn out just like Grandma's.
Old fashioned dessert recipes rarely contained nutritional info, but you can easily visit the Verywell website to get an approximate nutritional analysis and a Nutrition Label for your recipe.
Just copy and paste your ingredient list into the online Recipe Nutrition Calculator and select the approximate number of servings. However...
Whenever the old fashioned dessert recipes are written in paragraph form, you will need to estimate the servings needed and rewrite the ingredients as a list.
For example:
"2 cups cake flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, and 2 tablespoons butter" becomes...
2 cups cake flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons butter
Simply follow the editing instructions for any ingredients and measurements not recognized. It really is easy to do. After, you can take a screenshot on your computer should you wish to save the results.
For instance, here below is the analyses of the Zesty Orange Cupcake Recipe that's found on my page featuring Grandma's old fashioned cupcake recipes.
Some No Bake recipes might call for raw, uncooked eggs or egg whites. To avoid any health risk, please visit my Eggs and Salmonella page for simple instructions on how to safely adapt the old fashioned recipe.
You will love using this collection of practical kitchen and cooking tips including standard cooking measures, historical baking measurements, and wood stove oven temperature conversions for modern day baking.
There's also helpful information on ingredient substitutions and even step-by-step instructions for opening a coconut the easy way.
Some of the old tips and hints are definitely from a bygone era, yet they are fun to read, and you never know when you might find a practical use for them.
Believe me, there really is something for everyone here and more tips are being added as I find them, so be sure to bookmark this page and return to it often.
Listen to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello's "Who's On First?" skit from the World War 2 Special Services Division V-Disk.
(5: 54 min.)
Click Share and help to preserve Grandma's old fashioned recipes in their original form.
Grandma's button hooks for fastening tight buttons on leather boots and gloves.