Old Recipes New Ideas (1959)

[Music] Finding an old cookbook can be like finding long lost buried treasure. Those well-worn pages can bring back nostalgic memories of the wonderful dishes grandma used to prepare. But uh sometimes it raises that old challenge about women these days not being able to cook like grandma used to. Now uh maybe one of these old sauce recipes might be something to try. H add 3/4 of a jill of white wine and strain in 1 and 1/2 gills of the gravy. But hold on a minute. What's a gill? No Jill measurers in the house. Well, might as well read on anyway. Season with a dash of cayenne pepper and a pinch of salt. Adding a raw egg yolk and the juice of a half a sound lemon. Well, now that's just dandy. A sound lemon. Does that mean a big juicy one or just an average one? Or does it have something to do with the difference in lemon strengths? Looks like grandma had to do a lot of guessing with these recipes. And what about the bother and mess? And yes, even the waste involved using that oldfashioned juice squeezer. Anyway, that old squeezer will probably be a valuable antique before too long. Well, what else does the recipe have to say? Set the sauce pan on the corner of the range at Now wait a minute. That did it, the corner of the range. That must be referring to an old coal or wood range. Now, how does a modern woman do all this with her up to-date methods? Perhaps all it takes is a little translation. Now, what about this Jill business? Ah, liquid measure equal to one4 of a pint. Well, then a gill must be the same as a half a measuring cup. Now, what about that juice of a half a sound lemon? Well, any modern woman who knows her way around the kitchen has the answer to that. Reconstituted lemon juice always has the same uniform strength. And of course, there's no messy, wasteful squeezing to be done. Since 1 ounce of this bottled lemon juice is equal to that of one average size lemon, with her measuring spoons, she can follow that recipe with precision. Even the timing of her cooking is a matter of simple precision these days. You know, when it comes right down to it, that's the main difference between grandma's cooking years ago and cooking as it's done today. Precision, uniformity, and convenience. Grandma may have been a pretty good guesser with her pinches of this and dashes of that and her rituals on the old coal range, but uh we kind of wonder if grandma's dishes ever turned out exactly the same way twice. With today's homemaker, cooking is more than an art. It's a science. Now, she knows how she likes her lemonade, and even she knows how to make it that way every time. We suspect she'll grow up to like old cookbooks, too. But we'll bet she does things with old recipes that grandma never dreamed possible.