My Grandmother's recipes were only lists of ingredients. No oven temp, time or pan sizes. I imagine they were written when she was using a coal and wood stove maybe? I did find some that say to bake in a "goodly oven". I guess any housewife knows how to mix a cake and perhaps used a standard sized cake pan? I have had trouble converting.

I think I’ve written before that there are several recipes of my mother’s that I never learned to make nor did she write them down. One, for Germain Potato Dumplings, was from her mother… who also didn’t write it down.

I have my Grandmother’s (Maternal) recipe book and it’s not in there. But there are lots of yummy sounding ones… if only there were volumns, directions, etc.…. just Title and what’s in it. I’m still working on a couple. But it’s all guess-work. Does anyone know how much is: ”… a nickel’s worth of cardamom…” from the 1920s? My cousin is working on getting her Oatmeal Cookie recipe correct; hasn’t done it yet.

Maybe, if there are old fashioned ”receipts” of the just the ingredients variety, we can workshop them and try to rediscover what they were. A lot of my recipes from my mother are the ingredients list variety, but that's enough for me, for most things. But it's also one reason why I'm very detailed when I write one up. Inevitably, the person who asks for it doesn’t have the basic cooking knowledge.

I have to say, my mother taught me to test oven or pan temperature with my hand (the air temp, not metal!). It makes instructions like ”a goodly oven“ or ”a slow oven” easier to decode. I would assume a goodly oven is in the 350-375 range. Hot enough for Maillard effect, but not hot or scorching. AFAIC, there are about four basic oven temperatures above ”low”: cake, long roast (325F), browned baking (cookies, bread), casseroles, small meat cuts (350-375F), starting pies and other hot (400-425F), and pizza (475-550F). each oven is different, and the number on the dial isn't all thaat meaningful, since most recipes need to be tuned to the particular oven.

The only thing I can remember my mother making that I especially liked was hamburger corn pone pie. She did make Texas style cornbread (i.e., no sugar and no flour), and she used this recipe on top of her corn pone pie.

When I was little, the maid did the cooking (except generally for breakfast), and I especially liked her turnips and turnip greens and fried okra, but I was too young to remember how she made them. I also really did not watch her cook, but she cooked okra several ways, and I liked all of them. My father had given her a plot of land for growing vegetables, and so she grew those also.

My grandmother's favorite thing to make was bread, and she taught me to use potato water for the bread. My grandmother did not like to throw anything out, and she used vegetable cooking water to make sauces for the vegetables. Her family had to be frugal because they had 13 children, and my grandfather came from a family of 11 children. My mother OTOH was an only child, both her parents worked, and so it was necessary for them to be frugal (my grandfather certainly wasn't), but my grandmother was.

No one else wanted to learn from my grandmother, and so she taught me a lot of recipes - many of them cookies. Her stuffing recipe was one of my favorites, and I make it fairly often.

My Mother was an excellent cook and I have her recipes. The problem is that most are written by hand and she had her own unique abbreviations. I've figured out some of them but many leave me wondering.

A lot of abbreviations and acronyms that people use on forums here also leave me wondering. It's like some people are writing for a private audience.

@notdancin, if you'd like to post the puzzlers, in a new thread to get the most responses, we can try to figure some of them.