Well, since you can't check in a pressure cooker, is whistles some kind of steam release?

I had one recently that was just the limitations of my knowledge of French. It didn't translate. Islay Corbel, being a proper bilingual person rather than a computer program cleared that up.

I get what you mean about expectations. I have a lot of recipes that are little more than a list of ingredients, but I have the background to understand them. Then there are others where even with long detailed instructions, I don't know what the heck they expect.

I recently had a pie making conversation with someone who isn’t a regular baker. I am not an expert but pie is one of the first things I ever baked. Instructions I found easy to understand left her intimidated and confused.

I find that with cooking or gardening - I am disappointed but not discouraged by failure. Whereas my pie making friend may never ever attempt another pie.

The recipes I was looking at for gongura pickles are great - lots of funny instructions and ingredients I will never find in central Maine. Whistles and spluttering mustard seed... Plus I was searching very very early in the AM.

spluttering mustard seed.

No idea about the whistles, except to say that pressure cooking seems to be very popular in India based on videos I've seen, but I'm pretty sure this means whole mustard seed thrown into the pan till it hops around.

Why would a pickle have lentils (dal) in it?

I agree about the spluttering.

Here are two recipes using hibiscus or gongura leaves. I thought the dal in the pickle recipe might thicken the sauce or add a bit of flavor?

https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/gongura-pachadi-red-sorrel-leaves-chutney/

https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/gongura-pappu-recipe-andhra-pappu-recipe/

If you look for "roselle" you can probably find a lot of recipes from Jamaica and the Caribbean, but probably not for pickles. The leaves make a very interesting tea, too.

Writers block -

I agree about the tea - both iced and hot. Once I realized no flowering was going to happen I started finding ways to use it. I have added leaves to tea, salads and stir fries. I dried some for tea. I froze a bit. I have given some away. I figured if I pickle some before frost I will have done my due diligence.

For me, it has always been and will always be: soft ball stage!

In college I had a good friend from Alexandria Egypt by way of Paris. Despite her sophisticated background my friend’s younger sister had horrible manners when eating out especially in restaurant specializing in food from other ethnicities. I remember after a disastrous meal at a dim sum restaurant with the sister dramatically expressing her revulsion with bean sprouts and tofu thinking resentfully ‘hey I eat your food without acting like this’ - the names of which often translated to things like fuzzy root or green fruit.

Wow! I didn't really bake pies until I was pretty much grown up, but I guess I kind of absorbed the method by osmosis or analogy. I've never been confused by a pie recipe. Maybe sometimes less explanation is worth more? Tell your friend not to quit, and that the best way to make pie is to bake up at least half a dozen of them (on different days). By the end, she'll know how to bake a pie. It really is easy as pie. :)

When I first wrote up my mother's challah recipe, it was a normal recipe page, because it was just ingredients and order, and a small bit of advice about kneading in the last of the flour, and about shaping, but no detailed bread baking instructions, because one knows how to bake bread, right? But so many people were flummoxed because they didn't bake that it grew to three single spaced pages with detailed instructions for both hand and mixer, including how to tell when there's enough flour in it, how to punch down, etc. People still won't make it because they don't want to read it! And also because they don't want to pay for the saffron, but if you want the saffron flavor, you have to use saffron, and the good stuff, not the dried out strings they have in the supermarket (though you could soak and strain them if you needed to). One gal put in turmeric for the color, and it looked kind of okay but it didn't taste good at all. She could have asked me. I would have told her to smell and taste the turmeric and asked her to consider what she's tasted with turmeric in it. Sigh. Shades of Bridget Jones and the turquoise yarn....

It's not just recipes from other places, Grandma often used a "chunk of butter" or "cut the butter in with two knives" or kneaded something until it "feels right". I'd watched enough to know how big that chunk was and how to cut butter into flour, but if someone didn't, it would be terribly confusing and probably result in a recipe failure.

The "2 or 3 whistles" would sure get me thinking, though!

Annie

I have been trying to make some of my grandmother's recipes from her little black book. Problem is, there are only ingredients and their amounts... and nothing else. One cookie recipe calls for 2 pounds of almonds but doesn't say how they are prepared: chopped, halved, ground, whole. (?) Then there is "5 cents worth of Cardamom"; what quantity did you get for 5 cents in the 1920-30s? (And, I'm guessing the time frame.)

The worst offenders IMPE these days are online recipes that leave out a lot of crucial info - like measurements, &/or cooking times & temperatures!

And also IMPE, cooking lentils until smooth (not in a pressure cooker) generally takes about 30 minutes, a bit less when it's red (skinned&split) lentils.

Kate, 5 cents worth of cardamom might actually be a nickel sized volume, rather than price. I'd guess for cookies the almonds would be chopped in the standard way, your choice whether to blanch and peel. I tend not to unless the color is important. I think the texture is better with the skin left on, and I like the bit of bitterness against the sweetness of a cookie.

Annie, I think I get how to use knives to cut in butter just from your mention of it. Not really so different from using a pastry blender but without the butter sticking. ;)

I even have an idea of what the British "knob" of butter is (about 2 tbsp, all told). Is a "chunk" the same?

OTOH, if you know the basic formulae for baking, you can figure it out, or at least figure out what will work even if it's not just the same. I think we're so used to perfected recipes that we forget that we do know this stuff. I have a recipe that is a perfect traditional sized bundt cake. I can't duplicated it without the recipe. But I can make a pretty good cake without any recipe at all. I bet most of you could too if you thought about it.

I will admit that there is no way that I can make a cake without a recipe, but last week I was doing some research and found that the whistles refers to Indian pressure cookers.

Gosh, I still prefer two knives for making pie crust. As my mother used to say, a quick, light hand makes the flakiest crust. It's not like using a pastry blender, because with a pastry blender you're just mashing everything down together as you cut.. The knives are drawn quickly through the ingredients, cutting but not forcing them into a wad.

Of course, it really doesn't matter anymore because most people only know commercial-style crusts and think crust made in a food processor is just fine.

and then there's

this one

Writersblock, I believe you on the superiority of knives. I just meant that they'd cut through the dough like the pastry blender, so it wasn't hard to conceive of. I learned with a pastry blender... Which reminder proves I did, in reality, learn how to make pie crusts before adulthood but have blocked out all other memory of it. :) It works fine, nothing to brag about, definitely better than the FP, though if it's a choice of getting it made or not, I'll do the FP and it's not so bad. if not fair worthy. My current favorite for light and flaky is Stella Parks's method from Serious Eats. You cut up the frozen butter, dump it in the chilled flour, and then squish all the butter pieces with your fingers. It's more like rough puff in some ways, but bakes up nice and flaky and is dead easy.

I think that's the traditional British way. Isn't it, Islay? To just use your hands?

Oh, and yeah, I use the FP, too, especially when I know they can't tell the difference. At least it isn't a frozen crust from Publix.

ETA Didn't someone say something upthread about not understanding "soft ball stage"? You take a cup with some cold water in it and drop in a little of what you're boiling. If it just drizzles on the bottom, you've got a way to go, but it's ready when it coalesces into a little lump that you can kind of push into a ball. There's hard ball stage, too, where it makes a solid ball as soon as it hits the water.

OH! pillog, you are probably right about the measure for cardamom. That idea never crossed my mind since it says," 5 cents worth of cardmom." (sic) I would really like to perfect this recipe, which was a bit dry. When I last made it I used rough ground almonds but intend to use chopped next time. The flavor was very good. I did post this recipe awhile back when I was working on it. (I'd post that thread, but don't know how to find it anymore. )

I disagree on the cardamom...it's a nickles worth. I have seen recipes that call for enough "something" to cover a dime...but they used the term "worth".
I use a pastry blender....but I use a wire one. Don't like the kind that have slits cut into a metal bar!! And if I am making more than one single crust, I always use the food processor. Frozen butter cut into chunks and zap zap....it takes a light hand on the pulse button but I defy you to tell the difference between that and your "cut in" with knives.
Incomprehensible directions? "Enough flour to work it up"....that amount of flour can only be determined by experience.

The recipes for cakes from my grandmother. They were delicious. Unique. The recipe was a list of ingredients ending with the word "Bake". No time, temp or pan size. Some were a little more helpful and said "bake in a goodly fire". I gave up on the orange/raisin/walnut cake. I turned it into muffins. :-)

My grandmother was from Grand Bay, Alabama. She made the best Oyster Dressing, Seafood Gumbo, and Stuffed Crab. No recipe and nothing at all wrote down. I finally figured out the dressing and the gumbo. I still haven't got the stuffed crab quite right. She called it stuffed crab, but thought it crazy to put into the crab shells (blue crab). She made hers in a 9" x 13" pan!

That's like my grandmother's gefilte fish. She made patties. I didn't know until I was near grown that it was gefilte ("stuffed") because you were supposed to stuff it back into the fish bits! Nowadays, most people don't do that but here's an example: https://goo.gl/images/Y1gxaV

Oh! I have one, but it's along the line of Linda's having to have the experience with flour. For my great-aunt's blintz pancake recipe, you use a heavy crank egg beater in a pyrex measuring jug, and add flour, "Until it goes like this." Then the speaker lifts the egg beater and the batter runs off it just so. I can do it, but I wouldn't know how to make it comprehensible in words. ;)

I don't know about British pie by hand, but when I was a teen I learned both with wire pastry blender (I've never even seen that other kind which sounds more like a potato masher), and by hand, just working the flour between your hands until you get that to that crumbly state. I don't think much of that version of with your hands, however. I now know that it can develop the gluten too much from overhandling. I assume that with experience, one can get it done without making a tough crust, but the squish the cubes method is fun, like popping bubble wrap, and with all the chilling, works great in summer.

Cake from scratch is easy. Just think what's in every cake you've ever baked. A couple of cups of flour, a cup of sugar, half a cup of butter or shortening, half a cup of milk, 2 eggs, baking powder (about one and a half teaspoons). Add any kind of flavoring you like. Adjust the flour and sugar as needed to compensate for the additions.. Add an extra egg for more loft. Separate the eggs and beat the whites for even more loft. What I learned when I was making improvisational cakes is that it doesn't much matter if you just want cake, so long as you don't forget the baking powder. If you want a great cake that was just like the last one, follow a great recipe precisely. If you just want cake to eat, if the batter looks like cake batter, has the consistency of cake batter, tastes like cake batter and has baking powder in it, it's cake. Bake at 325-350 degrees F, for about 40 minutes or until a toothpick or wire (or skinny bamboo skewer, but those are hard to find, and the newer kind are too thick) comes out clean. Or until the center is firm when pressed, but that takes experience to know right.

I like watching videos of people making pie crust the French way. They smear the butter and flour, turn, fold and smear some more. It looks really cool. I don't think I've ever tried it though.

I like rubbing the frozen butter into the flour with my fingers.