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Regarding weights and measures, England had a bunch of legislation on the books, but no unified and consistent system until the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824 – about 20 years before Acton’s book was published. America, on the other hand, decided it would go ahead and figure out its own system of weights and measures, despite recommendations from Francophile Thomas Jefferson, who liked the metric system. That, by the way, was rolled out in France in 1799. If you look at cocktail recipes to this day, there’s almost always one set of instructions for US measurements, and another developed for the metric system – which means that you’re never making a completely faithful version of a drink if you swap between the two. So, although we take it for granted today when we see consistent volume or weight measurements on a recipe, there were very few consistent standards even a century or two ago, which actually lends a bit of curb appeal to all those relational recipes that just threw measurements out the window.
Time
Now let’s talk about time – right – Acton famously included “cooking time” on all her recipes. Well, it might surprise you to learn that until the middle of the 1800s – and for poor families quite a bit later – nobody besides the uber rich could afford a clock in their home – let alone one that was portable enough to be moved to the kitchen. To me, this doesn’t so much invalidate Acton’s recipes as it emphasizes the importance of making informed estimates about things like the passage of time. Even if it’s aspirational, Acton gives her readers a target to shoot for, which in itself was revolutionary.
Temperature
Finally, we have the issue of heat (or temperature). I won’t dwell on this too long, but suffice it to say that Acton’s cooking was all done on wood or coal stoves, so there was no such thing as setting the oven to 350 for one hour. That wouldn’t come along until much later, and since I just promised you that we’d be moving along to cocktails, which don’t require cooking, let’s fast forward to the last decade or two, where one popular drinks historian makes an important contribution to beverage recipes and our ability to re-create them.
Wondrich, Mr. Boston, and Beyond
Enter David Wondrich, good ol’ Davey-boy. Cocktail historian, noteworthy for his work at Esquire and just about every other respectable print and digital publication that has a regular drinks column. He is, of course, the author of two very important books, Imbibe! – which is a great entry point to spirits and cocktails – and Punch, which gets real deep and historical and has, in my opinion, even better writing than his first book.
Now, Wondrich faced a question that pretty much anyone interested in cocktails has raised at some point, which is: what did these classic drinks taste like when they were first invented? The first step, of course, is to dig up some sort of documentation that reveals a cocktail’s ingredients and measurements, and hopefully even its origins. But if you’re a true, primary source historian like Wondrich (and not like all these lazy bloggers and journalists I complain about during our featured cocktail segment), you might rightly be faced with a recipe that involves measures like “flagons” or “gills” or “wine glasses.” In both his books, he provides easy conversions for all sorts of arcane weights and measures, which is what makes them useful both as historical texts and as recipe manuals.
Wondrich’s books – as texts that bridge history and craft – are quite different from many others that were popular earlier in the century. Here, I think of the Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide which takes the form of a reference book like a dictionary or encyclopedia with short entries about each drink. Hold up Mr. Boston next to Imbibe!, and it looks like apples and oranges…kinda because it is. While Wondrich leans heavily on historical context, Mr. Boston and similar texts care more about the materials (and maybe a few sketchy notes on the process) needed to produce a given drink.
This reminds me quite a bit of the difference between Apicius, which we discussed in Part I, and Modern Cookery. Apicius, like Mr. Boston, is targeted at professionals – people who might consult it as a part of their day-to-day occupation (and perhaps even under a deadline). Books like Imbibe! and Modern Cookery are much more concerned with giving tools to people who are operating in their own homes – and if you’ve made it this far, I think it’s kind of cool to appreciate some of the heritages from which we can trace today’s popular cocktail books.
Like Acton, Wondrich begins Imbibe! with a list of tools and techniques that anyone who plans to read the ensuing pages will need to know or reference, and this explicit definition of terms is important because the assumption is that the reader hasn’t attended culinary school (or in Wondrich’s case, arcane cocktail school).
Going back to Brillat-Savarin, and even further to the Epicurean atomistic physics we covered in Part I, I think one way to distinguish these two different types of recipe books from one another (and to value them each for their own sake) is to think of texts like Apicius and Mr. Boston as being concerned with the quantity and type of ingredients, and texts like Imbibe! and Modern Cookery as being concerned with how those ingredients are manipulated and configured (and why). So the next time you purchase a book of recipes, or come across a sexy recipe blog on the internet, I’d encourage you to try and pass what you read through that filter. It could tell you what the recipe and its author are best-suited to communicate, and it could also offer insights on what might be missing in order for you to truly grasp the process.
The Role of Narrative in Recipes
Before I wrap up this episode with a list of my best practices for writing a well-crafted recipe drawing on all the stuff we’ve learned in the first two installments of this series, I’d like to take a quick pit-stop in our current time to consider a recipe trend I find charming – but only to a point.
Here’s when this trend first really occurred to me – and let me preface this by saying I do not own a television and I do not watch network TV on the reg, so I’m often oblivious to certain popular trends until they smack me in the face. That’s exactly what happened here.
Siba’s Table
It was New Year’s 2018, and my wife and I were in Lisbon for a trip she was taking as a business school requirement. And, wouldn’t you know it – I happened to contract just about the worst case of Norovirus that anyone has ever had the pleasure to meet. So there I was, lying feverishly in a hotel room in a foreign country, and the station I told my wife to leave on while she left for the day happened to be the Food Network – but not the good ol’ American Food Network – remember, we’re in Europe, so I was watching some UK version of the Food Network and they happened to be airing an all-day marathon of a show called Siba’s Table.
Now, I grew up watching chefs like Emeril Legassi and others who did cooking demonstrations – often in front of live studio audiences – but where the show was centered wholly around the food. But Siba had a style all her own. All I can remember about that day is lapsing in and out of fever dreams, listening helplessly (for I could not reach the remote) about how we were making this dish because Siba’s in-laws were visiting, and we needed to make this dessert because she was being visited by a childhood friend who had a mango tree in her backyard, and all the while we got to watch her husband entertain their two kids while Siba shopped for ingredients and prepped the dishes.
I don’t know if it was the cramps and cold sweats or the deluge of unnecessary plot lines that had me more bent out of shape that day, but I continue to be fascinated by the use of narrative (or story arcs) in recipes, and very quick to point out when someone goes overboard.
The Pioneer Woman
The U.S. has its own version of Siba’s Table in the form of The Pioneer Woman, who not only has a show with a similar format on The Food Network, but she also has a line of cheaply made cookware and serving ware that will break if you look at it the wrong way – I can tell you that from personal experience. In essence, the host, Ree Drummond is out there on her Oklahoma ranch living the American dream. Did the kids just get done wrastlin’ in the hay field? Let’s whip up grandma’s famous lemonade! Is the husband tired from a day milking horses out in the south pasture? Time for some deep fried shepherd’s pie! And for dessert? Well, you’ll get a heapin’ helpin’ of staged, scripted banter that somehow makes you feel like you’re just another member of the family.
I think you can see where I’m going with this. At a certain point, a recipe is no longer a recipe when you spoon feed it to people in the form of “info-tainment.” It may have been a recipe at one point, but when the delivery is somehow contingent on filling a 20 minute time slot to feed you ads…well, I’m gonna go ahead and unsubscribe.
When and How Narrative Can Work
That’s why I began this episode with Pablo’s wonderfully thoughtful and beautifully articulated story about his Sherry Martini with Pickled Morels. Let’s walk through it so I can show you what I mean in light of Siba’s Table and The Pioneer Woman:

Was there a story or an initiating incident? Yep. The story was, it’s Spring, and spring means morel mushrooms. Pablo likes to forage them – it’s a good excuse to get some exercise outdoors.

Was there a problem to solve or a reason why he made this recipe? Absolutely. He foraged some morels that were dry, and he was able to re-purpose them by pickling them and using them as a cocktail garnish.

Was useful information conveyed? Yes. Not only did Pablo give us the cocktail recipe, which he customized using carefully chosen ingredients from his bar and explaining why he selected each one, but he also gives us a bonus recipe in the form of his pickling liquid. He also told us about Morels and how to identify them.

I love a good story – but all good stories are real, just like Pablo’s, not constructed in order to prevent you from changing the channel. Remember that last detail of Brillat-Savarin’s favorite fondue recipe? 

Call for the best wine, which will be copiously drunk, and you will see miracles.

There’s no doubt that he himself had done so one day while serving or enjoying that very recipe and he was consequently the participant in or witness of some sort of minor miracle – or at least a cheese-and-wine-induced hallucination. It might seem silly, but even this is a “real” detail that I don’t mind encountering in a recipe because it teaches me something about the delicious potential that can be unlocked when you can arrange the atoms and void in your ingredients in just the right way, and in that sense, it is extremely valuable.
Tips for Writing Great Recipes
 Now it’s time to see if we can synthesize what we’ve learned over the past two installments of this “Art of the Recipe” series and turn them into a few helpful tips that will help you to be a better recipe writer the next time someone asks you for the secrets behind your favorite dish or drink.
Tip #1 – Be Careful What You Assume
Jerry Thomas might have assumed that the ingredients in his “Gin & Pine” cocktail were pretty obvious, but here we are, a century and a half later, scratching our heads. This is the “think about your audience” instruction that all writers need to consider before publishing something because your end product is going to be vastly different based on the assumptions you make about what your audience knows and has access to regarding tools and ingredients. So, if you make an assumption – make it a good one, based on reflection and evidence.
Tip #2 – Be specific about your materials LEGGI TUTTO

To be fair, Romans borrowed the idea that the world is comprised of atoms – just like they borrowed their gods – from the Greeks. Philosophers like Democritus and Parmenides paved the way for the notion that the universe is composed of particles that are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. In fact, Democritus went so far as to explain that the size and shape of atoms had a direct impact of taste perception, claiming that: Bitterness is caused by small, angular, jagged atoms passing across the tongue; whereas sweetness is caused by larger, smoother, more rounded atoms passing across the tongue.
But it was the Greek philosopher Epicurus who advanced the theory and really honed it to create an atomistic worldview that explained all objects and phenomena in terms of either atoms or void. Unfortunately, no primary sources of Epicurus’ writing exist, but historians widely regard the Roman poet Lucretius and his epic poem De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) to be an accurate mouthpiece for Epicureanism. We’ll return to that term in a moment and discuss its relation to food and drink in particular.
If that epic poem, De Rerum Natura, sounds familiar, you may be recalling it from our “Cocktails in a Tim`e of Plague” episode where I reference its detailed account of the plague of Athens. But aside from that bizarre final chapter, the rest of the poem is much more concerned with unpacking the atomistic nature of the universe. The basic premises of Epicurus’ atomic physics are as follows:

The Universe is comprised entirely of atoms and void

Atoms are unlimited in quantity, but have a limited number of types (like letters in an alphabet)

Different arrangements of atoms create different materials and experiences (like the same letters can be used to make different words)

And finally, all that exists was set in motion by an event he called “the swerve,” which is when one atom changed course and bumped into other atoms, causing a chain reaction of movement and recombination. (Today’s scholars obviously draw very close parallels between this and the Big Bang Theory, but many earlier Christian scholars viewed this as a validation of the idea of Free Will).

Let’s check out Lucretius’ explanation of Epircuean flavor theory. He writes [quote]:

And it is so straightforward to explain the sense of taste
On tongue and palate, that any extra effort is a waste.
First of all, in our mouth we taste the flavors when we chew,
Squeezing out the savor from our victuals as we do,
Just as you might squeeze in your fist a sponge that’s sopping wet
Until it’s almost dry. The flavors we press out then get
Dispersed through pores all over the palate, distributing among
The tortuous passageways of the more loosely textured tongue.
Then, if the particles of flavor that ooze out are smooth,
They sweetly brush against the tongue, and sweetly touch and soothe
All watery and moist places about the tongue. The more they tend
To be prickly, on the other hand, the more the bodies rend
And sting the senses as they are released.

If you know anything about flavor, this is a pretty accurate account of taste receptors, especially considering it was written during ancient times. And what I love most is how down-to-earth Lucretius is with his descriptions. Listen to how he accounts for the different traveling speeds of certain atoms using lightning and thunder as a case study:

Why is it that we hear the thunder after the flash appears
To our eyes? Because the particles that travel to our ears
Always take longer reaching us than those that reach the eyes
And trigger sight. Here’s an example you can recognize:
If you see someone far off with a double-headed axe
Felling a massive tree, you see the strokes before the thwacks
Reach your ears.

The reason I bring all this up is because the Roman empire paved the way for a lot of progress to be made in food and cooking. Their trade networks made it easy for people to access to spices, wines, and ingredients from far-off places. They tended not to completely strangle cultures in the places that they conquered, allowing for the circulation of many different ideas and documents. And of course, out of a society that worshipped gods and idols, we have the emergence of an atomistic worldview eerily similar to our own.
Now, to this day, lots of chefs will explain that cooking – or creating a recipe for that matter – is simply applied chemistry and physics. So it comes as no surprise that in a culture rich in ingredients and wealth and with thinkers who understood that manipulating the building blocks of matter would produce different results emerged a set of recipes greater and more influential than any that had come before.
Enter Apicius, or rather, the Apicii.
This is a surname that refers to a number of noteworthy Roman gourmandes who lived sometime around the first century BCE and were renowned for their culinary taste. Thus, the name became an eponym for anybody who was the roman equivalent of a foodie – kind of like Don Juan is synonymous with being a womanizer. So when a collection of hundreds of recipes began circulating among the wealthy kitchen owners of Rome, Apicius became a pretty good name for the book.
This is truly a snapshot of Roman culture worth looking into, especially because it’s available for free via Project Gutenberg, which I’ll link to in the show notes. In total, the collection contains ten chapters arranged by category that list recipes for everything from Rose Wine, to Ostrich, to stuffed dormouse.
Here’s a recipe for Roman Vermouth:

ROMAN VERMOUTH [or Absinth] IS MADE THUS: ACCORDING TO THE RECIPE OF CAMERINUM YOU NEED WORMWOOD FROM SANTO FOR ROMAN VERMOUTH OR, AS A SUBSTITUTE, WORMWOOD FROM THE PONTUS CLEANED AND CRUSHED, 1 THEBAN OUNCE OF IT, 6 SCRUPLES OF MASTICH, 3 EACH OF [nard] LEAVES, COSTMARY AND SAFFRON AND 18 QUARTS OF ANY KIND OF MILD WINE. [Filter cold] CHARCOAL IS NOT REQUIRED BECAUSE OF THE BITTERNESS.

Here, we begin to see something that resembles today’s recipes, something we might have a snowball’s chance at re-creating if only we could figure out how much a “Theban Ounce” weighs. But unfortunately, the specificity of this recipe is one of very few exceptions in the book – rather than the rule. Check out this recipe for milk fed snails and you’ll see what I mean:

TAKE SNAILS AND SPONGE THEM; PULL THEM OUT OF THE SHELLS BY THE MEMBRANE AND PLACE THEM FOR A DAY IN A VESSEL WITH MILK AND SALT. RENEW THE MILK DAILY. HOURLY CLEAN THE SNAILS OF ALL REFUSE, AND WHEN THEY ARE SO FAT THAT THEY CAN NO LONGER RETIRE [to their shells] FRY THEM IN OIL AND SERVE THEM WITH WINE SAUCE. IN A SIMILAR WAY THEY MAY BE FED ON A MILK PORRIDGE. LEGGI TUTTO