Bookmarked Making sense of modern recipes It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems by Jeremy Cherfas (Eat This Podcast)

Peter Hertzmann’s website à la carte will keep you occupied for hours. If you just want the paper we were talking about, here it is.

Measure for Measure is the article I mentioned by Raymond Sokolov on why Americans measure by volume. It was published in Natural History magazine, July 1988, pp 80–83, and there seems also to be a version in the 1988 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. Good luck finding it online. Or, drop me a note …
I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.

I want to read a few of these sources from Jeremy’s podcast–particularly the Hertzmann paper Modern Recipes: A Case of Miscommunication.
I had previously heard a reference (though I don’t recall where) to Fanny Farmer’s cookbook helping to popularize the American use of the cup measure. It certainly hasn’t done American cooking any favors.

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