Something has shifted in the hundreds of years that recipes have been written: people stopped cooking every day. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of us did. In the days of generations past, our ancestors learned how to cook by watching their parents or grandparents cook three meals a day, like clockwork. Today, these at-home lessons hardly exist, and it's largely due to the changing landscape of the workforce. With the transition from living off the land to sitting in front of computers, along with the convenience of frozen dinners and take-out food, cooking has become more of a luxury hobby than an everyday necessity.
It's why so many people are uneasy in the kitchen. They're scared of the stove. Terrified of braising. And they haven't got the faintest idea what the difference is between chopping and mincing. We can't even begin to count the benefits of our modern day society -- they are too great and varied -- but it has proven to be a sad time for cooking.
It has resulted in border-line insulting recipe language that's become common practice in our favorite cookbooks. And it's nobody's fault but our own.
If you read any modern cookbook, you'll be babied through the cooking process, one step at a time, no stone left unturned. It used to be that recipes were handed down as a suggestion -- they were written as they were told, and they were brief and to the point. We found a recipe from 1912 for chowder that was no more than four sentences long. Now a days, you can find a chowder recipe that goes on for two pages -- no lie. Why? Because every single painstaking detail is being documented. It's as though the recipe writers have lost their faith in our ability to make a meal.
There are countless examples of this in all of our favorite recipe books. And we too have caught ourselves using this language regularly. But we've rounded up the 10 silliest pieces of recipe terminology, just because. (And guys, we did not make these up.)
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