Cooking Hints and Tips

Grandma's old fashioned cooking hints and tips really come in handy when using her old fashioned dessert recipes. The historical recipes are shown exactly as first published, and sometimes you might need a little bit of help.

Old Fashioned Cooking Hints and Tips

Vintage recipes sometimes contain outdated measurement terms such as gill, salt-spoon, grain, and wineglass, making the quantities called for unclear.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, some of the baking recipes didn't provide accurate oven temperatures and cooking times.

So, I've gathered a collection of helpful hints to address the shortcomings of the old fashioned recipes along with some practical cooking methods to make your kitchen and baking chores easier.

Practical kitchen tips were often passed down from one generation of cooks in a family to the next, and now they are passed on to you. They'll help to ensure that your homemade desserts will turn out just like Grandma's.

Grandma's Cooking Hints and Tips

Bonus Household Hints and Tips

How to Get Recipe Nutritional Information

Old fashioned dessert recipes rarely contained nutritional info, but you can easily visit the HappyForks website to get a free nutritional analysis and downloadable Nutrition Label for your recipe.

Just copy and paste your ingredient list into the online Recipe Analyzer 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's easy to do. For instance, you might need to indicate the type of eggs needed.

Once you've entered all the ingredients and the number of servings, you'll see the calorie count for each ingredient.

Finally, view and download a Nutrition Facts Label should you wish to save the results. For instance, below is the analysis of the Zesty Orange Cupcake Recipe that's found on the Homemade Cupcake Recipes page.

About the Cooking Hints and Tips

In this collection of old fashioned cooking hints and tips you'll find weights and measures tables, suggested oven temperatures, recipe substitutions, and cooking tips.

There's also step-by-step instructions for opening a coconut in seconds and information on how to safely use raw eggs in recipes.

Some of the old tips and hints are from a bygone era, yet they are fun to read, and you never know when you might find a practical use for them.

There's something for everyone, and more tips are being added as I find them, so be sure to bookmark this page and return to it often.