Hello Paul!



 AW>> It's the vagueness that makes you ponder in the previous

 AW>> paragraph what a tablespoon measurement really means. Heaps

 AW>> of old classic recipes are full of vague directions. I've

 AW>> also overheard recipes like my favorite dessert (lemon

 AW>> delicious) being passed down from mother to girlfriend.

 AW>> There seems to be a hell of a lot of vagueness and rule of

 AW>> thumb type guessing involved. Cooking a lemon delicious

 AW>> pudding is an inexact science.



 PE> I still say you're totally making that up.  How about getting your

 PE> girlfriend to tell you the recipe, so that it can be added to pdrecipe,



I don't think I should add a recipe to pdrecipe if it's never turned out

properly when cooked 'exactly to specs'.



 PE> and then watch your girlfriend make it based on the exact measurements in

 PE> the recipe, and see what happens.  Oh yeah, do a blind test as well, say

 PE> one day she does it using the figures, one with
"vagueness", and you say

 PE> which is which (over the next year), and we'll see what your average score

 PE> is. No need to keep track of it yourself, just post a message here, thanks

 PE> to my deep messagebases.  BFN.



I can't do the experiment the way you suggest. When I visit my folks, my

mother cooks a lemon delicious for me without using any written recipe. It

always turns out perfectly. My girlfriend has tried to bake that same

dessert four times, from a recipe transcribed from my mothers memory. On

those four occasions the pudding has turned out badly and doesn't rise at

all. My partner is convinced that some additional "vagueness" steps have

been omitted from the recipe's transcript. Perhaps the oven has to be

adjusted a few times during the baking phase. It's just one of those

recipes that appears to have been passed down from generation to generation

and can only be taught "at the oven" and can't be written down.



The only blind taste test I could perform is to compare my girlfriend's

pudding with my mothers. The one my mother cooks vaguely from memory has

thus far been vastly superior.





Alan...



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