Then I'd be glad to see them!
Honestly, I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm seriously interested in period foodways and am always enthusiastic about learning more, but the details that fascinate me seem to make me come across as an annoying nitpicker here. No problem--folks have different ideas about what's fun, so I'm cool with that, and it may be better if I just bow out. I dunno.
Perhaps the problem is that I didn't make clear that I'm not a beginner, and maybe I dived right in deeper than I should have. However, I just assumed that many others here share similar backgrounds and interests.
To explain a little (and my apologies for the length, and for sounding like I'm bragging, because I cringe at that and really don't want to come across that way, but I don't know how else to explain):
As part of practicing for living history, I've looked at hundreds of period recipes in period cookbooks, tested them, and compared similar recipes to see differences between regions and changes over time from the early 19th century to the 1860s. However, I felt that many cooks in the period didn't tend to slavishly follow recipes, since that became more widespread in the post-Fanny Farmer era, when she encouraged more scientific cooking. Also, period descriptions of illiterate cooks, and period evidence in recipes of imprecise quantities based on texture or flavor indicated that cooks were expected to understand the goal of a recipe, even when some precise quantities were given.
So to portray that aspect of cooking in the period, I decided to learn to cook period foods without recipes. After comparing typical proportions from different period recipes, looking for patterns, and testing, I finally learned to bake cakes, make breads and puddings and so forth, without recipes, just using handfuls and pinches, yet trying to stay as close to documented period foods as possible, and have portrayed a semi-literate professional cook (since I'm male, wouldn't be cooking for a family) successfully getting three meals a day on the table. So I'm fairly comfortable knowing where the parameters are for substitutions and variations. And yes, of course, things may not turn out the same with different ingredients, but wartime substitutions and hard times may mean that something of fairly normal texture and flavor is good enough, even if it's not the ideal that could be made with optimum ingredients.
I know that baking soda and baking powder aren't the same thing, and some of the basics of their period context as well. The following may have some errors, since it's from memory, but it also may be of some interest to others, and also shows where I'm starting from, always in hopes of learning more:
Pearlash or potassium carbonate was one of the earliest artificial leavenings, showing up generally by the late 18th century through the early 19th. It was impure, tended to leave dark marks and possibly a caustic flavor if not perfectly mixed, and so commonly showed up in dark, strong-flavored gingerbread recipes to avoid that. If one sees "soda" instead of pearlash in cookbooks published before around 1830ish, which is very rare to see, there's a good chance it's referring to carbonate of soda, which had the same faults as pearlash, rather than bicarbonate of soda.
By the early to mid 19th century, saleratus or potassium bicarbonate came into more common use, and it was an improvement on pearlash, and began to be used commonly in a wider variety of foods. I suspect that potassium rather than sodium was used because it was a byproduct of wood ashes, something cheap and readily available to factories. Around the mid 19th century, bicarbonate of soda came into use, but recipes books, cooks and storekeepers still often called it saleratus out of habit, so for a wide period in the mid century, one can't be sure if saleratus specifically meant potassium or sodium bicarbonate.
Usually, before mid-century, soda or saleratus will be added to a recipe by first mixing them with a liquid, then pouring the liquid in. Around mid-century, the modern method of adding the powder to the dry ingredients starts to come into use. I'm not sure why this change occurred, but wonder if it had something to do with the chemical being impure, so one could get rid of lumps and check for impurities that wouldn't dissolve; it also may have been out of habit, to make it seem more like liquid yeast.
Around the same time, mid-century or a few years after, baking powder started coming into use, and became even more widespread as the end of the century progressed. If one sees "baking powder" before mid-century or in some contexts even after that, it may be referring to baking soda or saleratus, which were also called yeast powders.
Soda and saleratus made food rise, of course, because they were alkali, and when combined with an acid--usually sour milk, but also molasses or occasionally cream of tartar or tartaric acid or another acid--they reacted and produced carbon dioxide. Sometimes before mid-century, especially for making carbonated drinks, powdered acid and alkali were sold in sets of measured papers, white and blue.
Here's a typical example of the use of "yeast powder" and the two separate powders, from 1847.
Baking powder was an attempt to combine the acid and alkali in the proper combination in a single powder. The problem was preventing it from reacting too soon, if it gathered dampness. Period cookbooks cautioned to keep it well stoppered, and companies used various fillers to produce a suitable powder. All the baking powder, though, was "single acting," meaning it began to react as soon as it was mixed into the moist batter, so just like soda, you had to have the oven hot and get the batter baking fairly quickly--not really a problem, since cooks were used to that.
Typical modern baking powder is double-acting, meaning it reacts a little when moistened, then reacts again when heated, so one can take more time getting it in the oven.
As for liquid vanilla extract, yes, it's been around a long time, but I got curious about its context in period recipes. From what I've seen, recipes for things we associate with it, usually had rosewater or another flavoring in the early 19th century such as cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, etc., and then vanilla gradually increased as a popular flavoring as the century went on. "Extract," used without a qualifier, generally referred to a solid extract, or powder, in the early century, while liquid extracts gradually became more common by the 1860s. When vanilla was specified in recipes in the first half of the century, it was often as a vanilla bean, and one still sees that interspersed with other recipes that called for the extract, even in the 1860s.
So there's no
single thing which makes the recipe sound rewritten, but taking all its attributes together: the complete list of ingredients precisely specified by volume, the use of vanilla extract rather than other flavorings, the use of baking powder, etc., all make it sound like a brand new, unusual recipe of the 1860s
or an 1860s recipe adapted by someone familiar with late 19th/20th century foods. It's the same sense a person who's looked at a lot of photographs gets, when someone shows one that seems like it's post-war, even though there's nothing obviously post-war about it--just the little details of a hairstyle, the subtle cut of a man's coat sleeve, the style of studio background, the typeface of the photographer's name. Any of it
could be pre-1865, but it would be odd to find them all together then, and more common to find them all later when they were typical.
But the best way to keep honing one's sense of what's period and what isn't, is to ask about things that don't seem right, and find out more, which is why I asked.
Whew. My apologies for the long post. I dread hitting "reply" now, because I've probably come across as even worse of a jerk than before. But at least y'all know a bit more about what
kind of a jerk I am, LOL, and that my interest in foodway details is sincere and not just an attempt to be superficially argumentative or annoying. And maybe some of the above is informative too, hopefully.
I'll be glad to post sources and discuss evidence and research and so forth, if anybody's interested, but didn't want to go to all that trouble if, as I suspect, all that trivia isn't really important to anybody else but me. It still may be better if I just bow out of this section, rather than bore and annoy y'all.