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Summary:
'Updating' involves everything from transcription itself to changing the spellings to match their modern equivalents - but also to convert ingredients or their handling (room-temperature butter, for example), and finally the more substantial issues of converting cooking on something like a hearth to modern alternatives.
Some people gripe at any 'updating' but it's actually a subtle problem on where to stop.
There are even more subtle issues of updating than were touched on in the post. A lot of meats (especially chicken and pork) are much different than their equivalents of even a few decades ago. As a result, recipes in even relatively recent cookbooks like Julia Child's classics will "work" but they're probably not ideal for today's leaner pork and more tender chicken.
That reminds me: The older admonitions to cook pork until it's bone-dry and sawdust-like date from an earlier era before modern pig ranching, when trichinosis was more common and cooking until desertification was the only way to ensure safety. These days, at least in America, trichinosis is practically unheard-of and pork can be juicy and tender with very little actual risk.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/26/cooking-...
If you are going to update it would be a good idea to use weights in gram or kilogram rather than the volume of ill defined cups and vague quantities such as not too large. Then everyone could enjoy them without having to scour the web for equivalent measures. Similarly for Fahrenheit, it might have been modern in 1724 but most of the world has moved on.
It's not everyone, it's just you. Metric system might have been hot in 179x or when it was introduced after the French revolution, but it's it's not that hot anymore; it's simply not convenient, especially in the kitchen.
Here's my recipe: scour the web once and write it down; buy calibrated cups or measure what you have once and remember it (again, write it down); enjoy.