As an example of this I point to the recent CS thread on “cooling hot food before you put it in the fridge”. My parents also told me to do that.
I commented that I’d been told on a food safety course that it was originally required during the days of iceboxes. If something was too hot it could melt the ice and spoil the rest of the food before you got your next ice block.(TBH - I don’t know if this is 100% true, but it makes sense to me, so lets go with it.)
It’s now an example of something that was once legitimately required but is no longer, yet some people still do it.
The other example that crossed my mind today as I was having tea, is preheating the teapot by swirling hot water in it before you add the boiling water. This supposedly stops the pot from cracking. I saw the “Head Tea Master” of Twinnings on a talk show and he was asked about that. He said that was valid back in the 1800’s because ceramic quality was poor and pots could crack if heated suddenly. Lots of people still do it but unless you’re using an antique teapot it’s no longer required.
Any other behaviours we still do that once had legitimate reasons but are no longer required?
Not entirely true. While LCDs usually won’t burn in permanently, they can keep ghosts for a surprisingly long time. (My browser window left a semi-permanent line on my old monitor, which lasted for days even after moving the browser so the line formed somewhere else.)
Another cooking thing is heating up/scalding milk before using it in baking or puddings/sauces. If your milk is pastuerized, it’s already been heated up enough to denature the proteins that interfere with bread or pudding, so you don’t need to do it yourself.
Which means the traditional ‘tempering’ method of adding egg yolks to milk (heat the milk, add a little bit to the egg yoilks, stir, add a little more, etc) is unnecessary. If you’re making pudding (or creme anglais or anything else with milk thickened with egg yolks) there’s no reason not to just add all the yoilks to the cold milk and heat them up together.
The new bride is making her first big dinner for her husband and tries her hand at her mother’s brisket recipe, cutting off the ends of the roast the way her mother always did. Hubby thinks the meat is delicious, but says, “Why do you cut off the ends — that’s the best part!” She answers, “That’s the way my mother always made it.”
The next week, they go to the her parent’s house, and her mother prepares the famous brisket recipe, again cutting off the ends. The young bride is sure she must be missing some vital information, so she askes her mom why she cut off the ends. She says, “That’s the way your grandmother made it. I never questioned why.”
So the two call up the Grandmother down in Florida and ask her what’s the culinary reason for cutting off the ends of the brisket. “Darlings,” she says, “I never had a big enough pan.”
The other idea behind warming the pot is that it behaves as a heat sink. If you’ve got a big heavy teapot - the story goes - it will absorb the heat from the hot water as you pour it in and affect the brewing of the tea, or at least cool it too quickly. So you warm it first. Maybe apocryphal (even experts can sometimes believe what amounts to no more than folklore without considering its worth) but I heard it from a tea plantation owner in Darjeeling and a taster at Taylor’s of Harrogate, so there’s a potential for accuracy, at least.
Pricking sausages. They used to be very prone to bursting catastrophically during cooking (hence the British “banger”), so they’d routinely be pierced before cooking. Sausages can still split, of course, but the expense of meat meant lots of fat and filler would historically be used (especially during wartime) so the splitting was rather more explosive. Some folks still habitually stab their sausages now, which just means they ooze fat and dry out.
I don’t know about a teapot, but if you’re brewing tea in a mug, the thermal mass of the mug is definitely non-negligible: A mug initially at room temperature, full of water initially at boiling, will reach an equilibrium much less than boiling.
Though that’ll probably take longer than cooling to the air.
Salting aubergine (egg plant). We had to do this to reduce the bitterness which apparently has been bred out of the species.
Cooking pork well done. This was probably because pigs used to be given any old crap to eat, including meat. And lack of refrigeration. Problems that no longer exist - pork is fine to eat under done.
I know this isn’t food related but… typing a double space after a full stop (period). It was done in the age of typewriters when monospaced alphabets made sentence endings harder to read. Typesetters (a long forgotten skilled trade) never did this, and modern day typists shouldn’t either.
People do this now sometimes in order to let the fat drain out because… well aside from them not liking good food, I’m not really sure why. Maybe some kind of myth about fat making their clothes shrink or something like that.
If you measure, you’ll see that modern word-processing and page layout programs automatically add a larger space after a full stop (.) than there is between words.
Oh, the joys of getting a Word file with extra spaces and having to remove one!
Rare now, mostly back when we still had clients who’d grown up learning to type from Sister Olivetti (and getting their knuckles smacked if they didn’t do a double-space).
*Speaking of Word, it is NOT a page layout program. If you lay out a brochure using a word-processing program and send it to a professional printer, send along a printed copy of what it’s supposed to look like. The two printers I use say that Word will allow odd moving of text and images, and they often have to move items back (one designer friend will often just recreate it in InDesign).
“I am going to go out a limb and declare that putting two spaces after a period is obsolete,” Miller explains. “It is how most of us were taught to type on a typewriter. Therefore, most of us who do this (I have taught myself to stop putting two spaces after a period and it was hard) are over 50 years of age.”
Miller says he has heard that this has been used as a method of screening out older candidates.
We’re going off topic, but most printers ask for a PDF to print from these days to avoid such issues. Even from files created in Indesign - it just avoids handling errors or missing font problems.
I had to take the double-spaces-after-periods out of a manuscript not an hour ago. (I have no idea how old the client is (but I’m betting younger than me (61)) or what his religious upbringing was.)
There are at least a couple of very good reasons for continuing to double space between sentences, and they have little to do with appearance. They have to do with distinguishing between the end of an abbreviation and the end of a sentence.
1: So you can get an accurate sentence count.
2: Most word processors now treat the period as a signal to automatically capitalize the next word. I absolutely hate it when I’m typing a document with a lot of abbreviations and I have to spend a bunch of time chasing down and correcting a lot of misplaced capital letters.
I have yet to see or hear anyone give a good explanation of what possible downside there could be to double spacing between sentences.
This feature can be turned on or off as you wish. It’s useful to some, not to others; some can use it, others may not.
Typing things is incredibly commonplace, a task routinely performed by people who haven’t formally learnt the skill. So the machine automates double spacing to account for this. If it wasn’t automated, it wouldn’t be done.
The practice of hitting the spacebar twice therefore has the downside of excessive spacing as the doubling has already been done (and then the document looks odd); dropping the automation wholesale and requiring double spacing to be manually performed has the downside of creating millions of documents which aren’t double spaced, because it wouldn’t be done.
A lot of people still stick to the old rule of changing a car’s oil every 3000 miles “because that’s what my father taught me”, even though both oils and engines have advanced a lot and can go quite a bit longer between oil changes now. It didn’t help that a lot of those quick oil change shops pushed the 3000 mile rule just to get more business. I think most of those place have gone to recomending 5000 miles now, though.
I do that with bacon. When I fry bacon I cut the slices in half because my mom always did. She did it because she fried my dad’s bacon and eggs every morning in a small cast iron frying pan. The bacon didn’t fit in there full length. It just seems right to me to do it that way, even though my pan is bigger.
