The house sheets

Six sheets that serve any kitchen and belong to no single book.

The Ratio Almanac

Bread is five parts flour to three parts water. Pastry is three, two, one. Pound cake is one, one, one, one. Once you know the proportion underneath a recipe you can scale it, halve it, or rescue it halfway through, and you can tell before the oven goes on whether a recipe you found somewhere is going to work.

Tins and Temperatures

What to do when you have the wrong pan, which is most of the time. Pan volumes, what substitutes for what, oven conversions with gas marks, and the adjustments for baking at altitude. The dull sheet that everybody keeps.

When You Have Run Out

No buttermilk. No molasses. No self-rising flour. No Seville oranges, and it is February. What to use instead, with an honest third column: what the substitution will change about the result. Some are worth making and a few are not.

What Went Wrong

Symptom on the left, cause on the right. Dense biscuits, cloudy jelly, grainy fudge, a jam that never set, a soggy bottom crust. Thirty five faults across both cookbooks, each traced back to the thing that actually caused it, so the next batch is right rather than lucky.

Putting Up Safely

Home canning is the one kitchen job where being wrong is dangerous rather than disappointing. The acidity line and why it decides everything. Processing times, headspace, and why bottled lemon juice matters where fresh does not. Four rules that cannot bend, on one page.

Labels and Tags

The pretty one. Four sizes of round jar label, two sizes of rectangular, and twelve gift tags, so a jar of preserves carried down the road looks like it was meant for the person receiving it. The fields are fillable, so you can type a name in before you print, or print it blank and write by hand.

For Christmas at Green Gables

The Christmas Baking Countdown

Everything in a Christmas book has a right moment, and most of them are earlier than you think. The cakes want November. The peel wants five days it will not give back. The cherries wanted last July. One page lays the season out in weeks rather than dates, so it works wherever in the world you happen to be baking.

The Keeping Chart

The question every baker asks and no book answers in one place: will it still be good on the day? Every recipe in the book, alphabetically, with how long it holds at room temperature, in the refrigerator and in the freezer. Including the ones that must never go near a freezer at all, which is the part most charts leave out.

For The Green Gables Kitchen Companion

The Preserving Year

Everything worth putting by has a season, and most are shorter than you think. Strawberries in particular will be over before you have decided. One page lays the year out by season rather than by date: what is ready and when, the seven jars in the Companion with their yields and processing times, which four are worth doing if you only do four, and what keeps perfectly well in a cellar without a jar at all.

The Keeping Chart, for the Companion

The same question as the Christmas chart, asked of a harder book. All forty-seven recipes, alphabetically, with how long each holds at room temperature, in the refrigerator and in the freezer. Sealed preserves and opened ones, a pudding that wants aging, fresh butter, cordials and same-day suppers, all with different answers.

These sheets accompany the cookbooks: Christmas at Green Gables, forty-one recipes for the Christmas baking of a Prince Edward Island household, and The Green Gables Kitchen Companion, forty-seven recipes across a whole Island year.

They stay free. New sheets are added from time to time.