Post Class musings

The question arose in class about how cooking recipes can be an actual experiment.

Scientific methods include recording data. For recipes, the ingredients are important, but also the order of addition, aka Instructions. Weights are more accurate than volumes. So I can weigh ingredients, since I do have a scale. Another thought occurs that in bacon, for example, the portions are of fat to lean, are different in parts adjacent to each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bacon_in_a_pan.jpg

I wonder how to control for that... In looking at these pieces of bacon, between three similar pieces, they're relatively the same. I guess I'll have to compare slices/portions of the ingredients in an attempt to keep similarity of ingredients.

Other things I need to record are heat in conjunction with the coal volumes.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Embers_01.JPG

How am I going to keep up with three separate cooking vessels and record data at the same time? Coals are variable too, depending how much ash is on them as shown above. I think I'm going to have to record each session and record data after the fact. This of course is not optimal. I tried to keep the volumes of the pots similar. The soapstone and ceramic vessels have lids. The metal, a tinned copper, doesn't. I will have to put something on top.

How am I going to handle it if the different vessels need different amounts of coals to keep to a boil for example? I think the goal is MORE to determine the requirements of the vessels.

So a research statement (Thank you Nicola for your example and the impetus to craft a research statement!): Compare the requirements to cook the same Viking Age recipe in pots made of soapstone, ceramic and metal.

I would love to have feedback and thoughts! 

Comments

  1. NicolaJune 21, 2025 at 4:32 PM

    Hi Cynthia, love the blog! Another thing to think about - which may or may not be relevant to your project - is, for example, what was bacon like in Viking Norway? Even today, bacon in Australia is quite different to bacon in the USA or in Germany or Portugal. Same name applied to different products, which cook differently!

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    Replies
    1. Cynthia HaggertyJune 21, 2025 at 5:25 PM

      Good point, but bacon was only an example of a food that's not uniform and thus needs a bit more description and attempt to keep things uniform between the three vessels being compared.

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    2. Cynthia HaggertyJune 21, 2025 at 5:36 PM

      I actually didn't realize that the same name could be different products, so that's something to keep in mind! My goal is also to look at the food basis, pork is generic, but bacon is specific. A smoked meat is more plausible than say (American) bacon, because they wouldn't have sweetened it with sugar in addition to smoking pork. I-ll need to go "back to basics" and think about scratch cooking, rather than "semi-homemade", like my normal cooking.

      Delete
  2. NicolaJune 21, 2025 at 4:37 PM

    It will be interesting to compare our projects as there are quite a few intersections and similarities, but we are conducting our experiments on opposite sides of the world in opposite seasons and neither of us is in Europe!

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