Have you ever noticed?

These are a few things I have observed in my kitchen travels:

Many of the older recipes, in older cookbooks and recipes from grandmothers and great grandmothers, contain the 1/3 measurement many more times than the 1/4 or the 1/2.

We must learn the terms of today, years ago, and the terms of different geographic areas in order to make their recipes. Here are just a few examples:

Butter: block, cube, stick, cups, pounds, ounces

Margarine: oleomargarine, oleo, and the brand names. Many times, margarine was used in place of butter and no note was ever given.

Oil: vegetable, canola, olive, virgin olive, extra virgin olive, corn, safflower, cottonseed, sesame, walnut,and many more. Many times in recipes a brand name was used instead of the word oil: Wesson seemed to be the most used back in the day.

Shortening: Lard, Crisco, Fluffo, and vegetable shortening. Fluffo was a yellow colored shortening used most frequently for pie crusts and fried chicken. My mom used to send me the large cans of Fluffo once in a while. It cost more to mail it to me than it did to buy it. She did this because I could not find it in the Kansas City area. I used it ONLY for pie crust. Crisco was the term most commonly used for shortening in my generation.

These were the main terms that I have run across lately. I know there are many more. I'll keep you posted on additional words.