The Sifter thesifter.org

a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

– A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

(From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

I can’t wait to try this some time.

Update July 5, 2020: link replaced with Internet Archive, and then I gave it a more permanent home on AllTheBest.Recipes.

Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups | Serious Eats: Drinks.

Hanging out with Lee & Sachi in Seattle, we dove into the world of shrubs:

In any case, the sugar, acid, and optional alcohol preserve the fruit juice, and in fact that was one original purpose of the shrub. Prior to the invention of refrigeration, a shrub syrup was a means of preserving fruit long past its picking. Shrubs were popular in Colonial America, mixed with cool water to provide a pick-me-up on hot summer days.

 

A proper shrub has a flavor that’s both tart and sweet, so it stimulates the appetite while quenching thirst.

This got me thinking about drinking vinegars, which is somewhat a name for the syrup + vinegar that you make shrubs from. We had some in Vancouver  at The Union which was fantastic.

So, Lee and I concocted a shrub syrup from 2 oranges simmered in simple syrup and then added some sherry vinegar.

Lee made up a drink with Averna in it and some soda. It was pretty delicious, especially when we kept amping up the amount of sherry vinegar.

Yep, I’m a fan. And to think, it’s supposedly a summer drink.

Update July 5, 2020: I’ve gone on to make many more shrubs / drinking vinegars. Browse the AllTheBest.Recipes shrub tag »