A friend has been translating into English Armenian recipes written in Greek and published in Turkey. Quite a feat . . . but the collection, a testimony to the history of a people . . She writes, "Don't you love the general, non-specific, fuzzy directions....that's how old Greek recipes are too (I can hear the writer thinking "what!?? Don't you know what temp. to set the oven?? what kind of housewife are YOU!)"
Of course, in the early days, there were no "ovens" to set temperatures at . . . only wood burning stoves, if the cooks were lucky! [Even in Wilbraham, cooking was done on open fires outside, or inside the cabin using cast iron wood burning stoves!]
Here in the good old USA, before Betty Crocker . . . A handful of this, a pinch of that.
And Marash Boy's mother's expression when giving directions as to how much of anything to add to a preparation she was making, "Achku chap," measurement by the eye. "God didn't make recipes in heaven," she would comment. Her very "modern" daughters were always annoyed that their mother didn't follow recipes. That is, until they grew up to realize, as Mark Twain would say, how much their mother had learned in the last few years!
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