[Sca-cooks] Elizabeth Crocker

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 22, 2008, at 4:35 AM, Huette von Ahrens wrote:

>
> --- "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> (Although in fairness, no cook on earth was as cost
>> effective as the habits my mom acquired during the Depression.  
>> What???
>> Throw away a perfectly good wrapper from a stick of butter without
>> scraping the last fourteen molecules of butter off it first? Do you
>> think we're made of money around here???)
>
> Well, my mother, also a Depression child, wouldn't waste the energy to
> scrape those last fourteen molecules of butter off the wrapper.  She
> would use them to grease the pan, thereby not wasting them and also  
> having
> a bit of protection to keep her fingers from getting greasy in the  
> process.

Touché. That would be the way to go, _if_ you had a pan to grease. If  
not, that would be a waste. ;-)

Obviously the important thing is that those fourteen molecules not be  
thrown away needlessly.

This type of thing is, of course, at the very heart of all the  
allegations of "cooking like a housewife". Sometimes professionals  
don't scrape the butter wrappers _or_ use them to grease the pan, even  
though it's a major fiscal point for somebody running a business to  
know that at the end of three years they might save a whole pound of  
butter that way. Sometimes the cook needs to ask him or herself if  
that is the best use of limited time.

Adamantius (who sometimes throws away entire micrograms of butter at a  
time, in shocking displays of profligacy, and sometimes not)