Cooking from a 1900s cookbook: ovens, measures and what to leave alone

“Bake in a moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour.” That is the last line of Mrs. Rorer’s Golden Loaf, a potato bread from 1907, and it is about as precise as a baking instruction got before ovens had dials. The rest of her recipe is surprisingly exact: half a pound of potatoes, a pint of scalded milk, a rise at 75° Fahrenheit until doubled, “or about three hours and a half.”

That mix of precision and guesswork is typical of the cookbooks on this shelf, and once you know where the guesswork sits, most of the recipes cook well.

Oven words

A coal or wood range had no thermostat. Cooks judged heat by holding a hand in the oven, by how fast a sheet of white paper browned, or by a separate oven thermometer if they were well equipped. The books therefore speak in words:

In the book	A sensible modern start
Slow oven	300–325°F (150–160°C)
Moderate oven	350–375°F (175–190°C)
Hot or quick oven	400–450°F (200–230°C)
Very hot oven	450°F and up

These are conventions, not conversions. A range oven heated unevenly and cooled as the fire burned down, so writers built that into their timings. Janet McKenzie Hill, in Baking Cakes, quotes Mrs. Lincoln’s rule of dividing the baking time into quarters and watching what the cake does in each. It still works, and it teaches you more than a timer does. Her test for doneness, a cake that “shrinks from the pan” and makes only “a slight singing noise”, is as good as any skewer.

Hill’s Cook’s Time Table is worth a look for the same reason. Rare beef ribs at 8 to 10 minutes a pound, a ham at 4 to 6 hours: the minutes per pound are close to modern advice, which tells you her ovens were not as wild as people assume.

Measures that changed

Level measuring with standard cups and spoons was still a fairly new idea at the turn of the century; Fannie Farmer’s Boston cooking-school book of 1896 is usually credited with spreading it. Older books, and plenty of newer ones, still use household objects:

• Gill: a quarter pint. In American books that is half a cup. British books mean a quarter of the larger imperial pint, a little over half a cup.
• Saltspoon: a tiny spoon for the salt cellar, roughly a quarter teaspoon.
• Teacup: smaller than a measuring cup, usually reckoned at about three-quarters of one.
• Butter the size of an egg: about a quarter cup, or 2 ounces. “The size of a walnut” is a generous tablespoon.
• A quick oven, a slow fire, a hot fat: words for heat, covered above. For frying, “hot enough to brown a cube of bread in forty seconds” and similar tests still work with a thermometer at hand; around 360 to 375°F is typical.

When a recipe gives both a weight and a cup, trust the weight. Flour in particular was sifted before measuring, so a cup of it weighed less than a scooped modern cup. If a cake comes out dry, that is the first thing to adjust.

Ingredients that are not what they were

Yeast. “One compressed yeast cake” means a small moist block of fresh yeast. A packet of active dry yeast, 2¼ teaspoons, stands in for one cake in most two-loaf recipes. Old breads rise slowly by modern standards; Rorer’s three and a half hours is normal, not a typo.

Leaveners. Saleratus is an old name for baking soda. Recipes that combine soda with cream of tartar are making their own baking powder.

Gelatine came in sheets or in boxes of varying size; follow the packet on your own gelatine, aiming for the set the recipe describes.

Beef extract and Kitchen Bouquet, both used in Twenty Quick Soups, are still sold. A good stock cube will do for the first.

The chapters to read, not follow

Preserving is where old books stop being quaint. Everywoman’s Canning Book (1918) was written with real care. Mary B. Hughes warns that thirty minutes will cook beans but “it takes three hours’ continuous cooking to kill the spores”, and she describes an intermittent method that boils the same jars on three successive days. Her time table gives corn four hours in a water bath.

It is still not safe. Boiling water at sea level tops out at 212°F, and the spores of Clostridium botulinum in low-acid foods (corn, beans, peas, asparagus, meat, fish) survive it. A pressure canner gets the jars to about 240°F, which is why every current tested guide, including the USDA’s and the National Center for Home Food Preservation’s, requires one for those foods. Oven canning and open-kettle canning, both found on this shelf, are also off the list.

Jams, jellies, fruit and properly acidified pickles are a different story; a boiling-water bath suits them. Even there, check a current recipe for headspace and processing time, because jar sizes and lids have changed.

A short routine for any old recipe

1. Read it through twice and write the oven word as a temperature in the margin.
2. Convert household measures, and weigh flour if you can.
3. Halve the recipe the first time. Many of these books cooked for families of eight.
4. Look up any ingredient you do not recognise before you shop; some are brands, some are old names.
5. For anything canned, bottled or cured for storage, use a modern tested method and keep the old book open beside it for the flavourings.

Then cook it as written once, before you improve it. Half the pleasure of these books is finding out what a Philadelphia kitchen thought was a quick soup in 1894.