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Serious question, did anyone else learn to cook before the internet?
I was cleaning out my grandma's old recipe box last weekend and found a note she wrote in 1987 about how to tell if a cake is done by sticking a toothpick in it. It hit me that I learned almost everything about cooking from YouTube videos and blogs, not from family or cookbooks. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized how much the way we learn basic stuff has changed?
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the_alice2mo ago
Oh man, I still half expect a YouTube video to pop up and explain why my bread didn't rise every time I bake. Grandma just had to know things by feel, while I'm over here treating a cake like a science experiment with timers and thermometers. Guess we traded family secrets for search bars and it's mostly worked out okay.
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vera_palmer2mo ago
I read this thing recently about how grandmothers actually did use a kind of science, they just called it "feel" after years of trial and error. It made me think of you @the_alice and how we're finally catching up with their methods, just through Google instead of experience.
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jesse_williams621mo ago
Oh man this is so real. I started keeping a little notebook for my baking after like three failed sourdough loaves and honestly it feels a little silly but it works. @vera_palmer you're totally right about the trial and error thing though, like my grandma never wrote anything down but she could tell when dough was ready just from touching it. Meanwhile I'm over here googling "why is my dough sticky" at 11pm on a Tuesday. It's kind of nice that we've got all these resources now but I do wonder what little tricks we're missing out on because we never had to figure it out by feel.
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