Old books on baking

It has yet again been a busy week at work. The months of April and May are usually pretty intense. Lots of student are writing papers at the end of the semester, and they need more literature than normal then.

Tuesday afternoon I went to Malmö to do some shopping. The supply of clothes in my taste was very limited. I came home with some socks. Not much of interest there. I managed to find a special birthday card that someone in the US wanted, though. I had dinner at TGI Friday's, a restaurant that opened only last year. Interesting place with food in American style, and better than the one in London. Had a cheesy baconburger and then mud cake for dessert. Very nice.

Desk duty on Thursday was slow at first, but at the end it was mad. At one moment there were five members of staff and three visitors standing in front of the desk at once and all of them were talking (to each other or to me) at the same time. To make things worse my computer wasn't working properly and I didn't dare to do any work on it that had to be saved. It has happened before that documents I have written on it have been lost and e-mail messages I have sent have never reached the intended persons (or anyone else). We are so dependent on the computers these days.

There must have been something wrong with the dinner I had Thursday evening, because I got food poisoning during the night. Very unpleasant to get so sick. I did make it to work on Friday, but I was tired and made several mistakes. It's hard to believe, but shuffling books to and from the stacks is an intellectual job that requires a connected brain.

Today Amnesty had a second hand book sale in Lund and I was there, of course. I got two books on baking. They were rather old, from 1934 and 1946. It was interesting to see that some recipes can still be found in modern books. The book from 1934 didn't contain any oven temperatures and sometimes not even number of minutes the cake should be baked. Instead they wrote something like "bake in moderately hot oven until cake is dry". I have about 30 books on baking/cooking from the past 80 years and it's fascinating to look in them and see how the way we bake/cook has changed (or not).