22. Returning to cooking at home opens the way to return to old cooking tips
In the late 1990s, a trend began which continues, that of preparing meals at home, using fresh locally produced ingredients whenever and wherever possible. Prepackaged, “complete” meals are delivered to the door, grocery stores reintroduced the delivery of foods to the home, and cooking returned to a place from which it had temporarily been exiled. With it comes the need for old tips which made the chore easier to be reinstated. Few are new, though some seem to think they are. Most are skills and ideas developed over centuries by cooks to ease their task.
One such is the use of an inverted clear pie plate, or casserole dish, or glass baking pan, over the recipe card or cookbook page being referenced while preparing a meal. The glass protects the page from being soiled from the efforts of the cook, and at the same time acts to enlarge the print and images on the page. As household cooks learned to use this technique, which goes back decades, they also found that the weight of the dish prevented the pages of the cookbook from flapping.