Scenes of kitchens very unlike ours materialize, full of strange utensils like salamanders (long-handled tools for broiling), croquette molds and fluted knives for cutting root vegetables into fancy shapes. There are unusual cooking methods, like in an 18th-century recipe for beefsteak panbroiled over a fire made from two newspapers. Without kitchen timers or thermometers, the DB’s cooks were often forced to be ingenious in measuring when a dish was done: ‘‘until the bones are ready to fall out,’’ ‘‘until you can run a straw into the skin,’’ until ‘‘the milk tastes of spice,’’ ‘‘till it be soft and limber.’’ They used their senses more acutely than we do. The more fragments Wheaton collects, the more cookbooks reveal their variety, and also their mystery. There is no universal cookbook, only a tower of Babel where no cook fully speaks the language of any other. However imperfectly, the database helps decode these fragmentary snatches of dialogue: not just the ingredients of the soup, or the pot it was cooked in, but also the values of the person who prepared it. ‘‘I had to learn to listen to the writer’s side of the conversation with his or her reader,’’ Wheaton says. …show more content…
An American cookbook from 1881 includes many recipes for marble cake, but almost no verbs, because the authors assumed that the method for marbling batter was common knowledge. Amelia Simmons, in 1796, imagines that we will have a cow on hand that we can milk straight into a dish of cider and sugar to make a syllabub, a frothy dessert: ‘‘milk your cow into your liquor’’ she calmly directs, as if it were something normal — and for her, it